ENTERTAINMENT

"One Night In Jordan", Roman Amphitheatre, Amman - June 2008

Sound By Design recently completed a rather unique project in Amman, Jordan. We were contracted by Fleetwood Mobiles to provide PA whilst they looked after the recording aspect of a spectacular live show.

“One night in Jordan” was a one-night event put together by the world-renowned Jordanian Pianist Zade Dirani involving more than 90 musicians including London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and London Voices. It was presented under the patronage of Princess Haya in memory of His Majesty the late King Hussien and took place in Amman’s 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre, presenting everyone with some interesting challenges.

With very short notice of the event (less than a week) some late nights were had in the warehouse preparing some four tonnes of equipment needed for the concert in readiness for the specially chartered Airbus A310 from Manston, Kent. Late nights were also required at the venue. With temperatures reaching some 47°C (at 2% humidity!) it was nearly impossible to work before 3PM on site, just touching a flightcase proved difficult! Indeed, one of the Digico mixing consoles was registering over 50°C internally and the orchestra had to be covered with a marquee to stop the instruments going out of tune!

As we were quite restricted in what we could do with the system because of the venue’s listed status and TV camera sight lines, Systems Engineer Dave Shepherd chose to utilise two ground stacks of four Meyer Sound MICA in front of the stage which was supplemented by UPA-1P front-fills, 700-HP subwoofers and MSL-4’s on the upper tiers of the amphitheatre (many thanks to the locals for carrying these for us!). Even though we had used Meyer’s predictive MAPP software to plot the venue, we were quite surprised just how well the MICA threw all the way to the top of the venue!

On mixing duties was a pair of Digico’s (Griff Hewis utilising a D1 at FOH with a D5 at Monitors), which coped admirably with the heat. Some 26 mixes were generated at Monitors, both on in-ears and conventional EM Acoustics M-12S wedges with an RME MADI splitter utilised to generate splits for Recording. The whole system was kept in time via Word Clock from a Rosendahl Nanosync. Fleetwood Mobiles were located in a refrigerated truck (lucky, lucky) some 50m from stage with two 112-channel Pyramix systems and Sound By Design’s MADIcorder as a backup. Eventually we had over 100 circuits on stage including microphones from DPA, Schoeps, Neumann and Shure.

The amphitheatre was packed out for the show with over 3,000 people including the Jordanian Royal Family present. The concert was a great success with an HD DVD due out later in the year. A very nice email from the end client arrived in our office saying;

“Thank you all for the fabulous job you did in Amman. It was an absolute pleasure to work with you all and I can't thank you enough for all the hard work and effort you guys put into this show to make it happen under extraordinary circumstances.”