“The Night of 1000 Voices” is a spectacular variety show, devised and directed by Hugh Wooldridge, which has been an annual event at London’s Royal Albert Hall since 1999.

The show raises large amounts of money for charity and in 2005 was staged in aid of the Karen Keating foundation, a cancer charity set up by Gloria Hunniford & her family in memory of Karen.

For the 2006 performance of “The Night of 1000 Voices” Hugh and Gloria teamed up once again, to take the production to Belfast's Odyssey Arena to perform the show to Karen’s home crowd!

The Odyssey arena provided some unique challenges for the Sound By Design crew, who’s brief was to re-create the intimate theatre feel of the Royal Albert Hall in a 10,000 seat ice-hockey stadium.

Sound Designer Phil Wright worked with Dave Shepherd to co-design a flown centre cluster system utilising 3 hangs of Meyer Sound M2D & M1D curvilinear arrays.  This system provided ultra-smooth coverage of the entire auditorium, and being mono provided superb vocal intelligibility, which is so important for musical theatre delivery.

Meyer Sound CQ-1s, UPA-1Ps and UPM-1Ps completed the flown system coverage in the near field. A cardioid polar pattern sub-bass array was created under the stage, designed by Dave Shepherd and John Gale, which used 7 x Meyer Sound 650-R2 subwoofers to create a very even coverage in the auditorium and total cancellation on stage, making the on-stage environment far nicer for musicians and engineers alike.

The 16 channels of outboard on the Digico D1 FOH console provided all system processing and the whole PA system was aligned & monitored using Meyer SIM II. The small footprint of the console and lack of outboard meant that many seats, which had been taken off sale for the mixer position, were made available to patrons on the long waiting list for tickets.

Both the Front-of-House sound and Monitors were mixed from FOH, enabling the monitors to track the vocal changes through some very fast musical sequences. The balance, undertaken by Phil, used 2 Digico stage racks to accommodate the 96 inputs from stage, making a total of 112 channels running on the console simultaneously. Using the remote software and a wireless router, Phil & Dave were able to listen out in the auditorium while mixing and make sure that the system & the monitor balances were all exactly as they should be.