Sound By Design recently supplied the sound reinforcement for Mastercard's Priceless Evening held this year on the 16th November in the intimate setting of Café De Paris, Leicester Square. This unique event featured some of this years top breakthrough artists with James Blunt, Athlete, KT Tunstall, Ray LaMontagne, The Corrs and Texas all performing sets in their full band line-up.

The show was recorded for a 90-minute Channel 4 TV special for transmission on the 2nd December 2005, and with this in mind the design brief was to be as unobtrusive as possible in providing high-fidelity sound reinforcement and stage monitoring for an audience of around 300 people.

To achieve this, System Engineer Dave Shepherd designed a first class system based on flown Meyer Sound M1D curvilinear array loudspeakers complimented with Meyer PSW-4 subs, and Meyer CQ-1's were used to provide covering fill in the upper gallery areas. Both the broadcast crew and client commented particularly on how unobtrusive the system was in such a small venue.

Keeping in mind the space restrictions of the venue both FOH engineer Griff Hewis and monitor engineer John Gale chose to use Sound By Design's shiny new Digico D1 digital mixing consoles, reducing the space required for outboard processing racks and system management considerably. This also allowed each band sound check to be saved and then recalled instantly in the very short changeovers. The hectic world of stage and patching was handled admirably by regular Sound By Design crew, who fought tirelessly against the odds to get each band on stage in their allotted time and keep the show on track.

Fitting stage monitoring into such an intimate venue is always a challenge, but Sound By Design's compact EM Acoustic M-12S wedges were perfectly suited to the task, with a Meyer USW-1P sub and Meyer USM-1P wedge utilised as drum-fill. In addition, Sound By Design provided four wireless IEM systems based on Shure PSM700 series with Shure E5 drivers for bands requiring in-ear monitoring.