Sound By Design recently supplied the sound reinforcement for the Forever Living Products European Rally, held this year at the Nikaia Arena in Nice, France. Building upon our existing long term relationship with production company Creative Realisation, Sound By Design have provided sound services for FLP events on a monthly basis for many years with this event being the largest show undertaken to date with this client.

The 9,000 person capacity arena saw a crew of seven from Sound By Design install a “high fidelity, high impact” sound reinforcement system that provided crystal clear production to every seat in the venue. In addition we provided full production comms, both in wired and digital radio formats. Senior engineer Dave Shepherd took on the system design and project management for this event, following a brief to provide sound reinforcement at full “rock and roll” levels right to the rear of the arena.

Always a marathon show, the FLP European Rally is a huge event in terms of production. The eight hour long show saw various live bands, trapeze and trampoline artists, award presentations, VT stings, and was dramatically kicked of with a helicopter landing in the rear of the arena for a spectacular stage entrance by the company directors. Not only did the Sound By Design system have to keep up with a 9,000 strong audience armed with air horns, but we had a helicopter to contend with! All in a days work, (well technically more than a day, but you get the idea...).

To achieve this, Dave designed an excellent system using Meyer Sound MAPP Pro acoustical prediction software that consisted of two flown hangs of fourteen boxes of Meyer MICA Curvilinear Array, one of our largest long-throw system designs yet. Eight Meyer 650-R2 sub-bass cabinets were placed in a spaced array to provide even sub-bass coverage throughout the venue and three ground-stacked Meyer MSL-4 cabinets a side were used for audience side-fill in addition to eight Meyer UPA-1P’s for front-fill. System management for this was handled via BSS Omnidrive Compact Plus' and Meyer LD-3 line drivers allowing us to perfectly align the system and compensate for changes in temperature and humidity. SIA Smaart FFT analysis was used to take measurements of the system response during the rig and show to ensure perfect system coverage throughout the venue at all times.

At front-of-house, Richard Denham mixed the main sections of the show on a 48 channel Midas Heritage 2000 with outboard from BSS, Klark Teknik, TC Electronics and XTA. A regular Sound By Design freelancer was sting operator for the show, triggering hundreds of playback stings from a 360 Systems ‘Instant Replay’ Unit, minidiscs and CDs, whilst editing in Adobe Audition during rehearsals. Sting and VT playback were sub-mixed on a Midas Venice 240. Radio microphones were sourced locally to adhere to European licensing laws, with a mix of Shure and Sennheiser headworn and handheld systems and presenter in-ear foldback.

Stage monitoring duties fell to John Gale. As is becoming more common for John, the board of choice was a digital Digico D1 Live with EM Acoustics M12S monitors and QSC amplifiers. A combination of Meyer USW-1P and USM-1P was used for drum-fill and Meyer CQ-1’s provided stage side-fill for the speech area. In total sixteen EM Acoustics M12S wedges were required in order to cover the extremely wide stage in addition to the side-fill and IEM’s.

Backstage, regular Sound By Design freelancers could be found. These chaps not only did a fantastic job with the system installation and radio mic allocation, but also found a new niche as crowd control specialists when four hundred Hungarians decided it was time to be on stage. A special award was given to one of them for dealing with the huge comms rig on the show without suffering a nervous breakdown.

Once again, the Sound By Design crew had a great time on a most successful event and we look forward to our next FLP Rally…