Sound By Design recently supplied sound reinforcement for a special one-off show at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Bankside, London. The ‘radio-play’ performance was recorded by the BBC World Service in front of a live audience and has been considered the first of it’s kind. It is due to be transmitted on the 23rd of December 2006 to an estimated worldwide audience of 43 million people – the largest audience ever to simultaneously hear a Shakespeare play.

The brief for Sound By Design was to provide discreet and transparent sound reinforcement for the event, without resulting in any PA colouration on the radio recording. A cast that included established actors Philip Madoc and Fiona Shaw were not encouraged to project to the audience (as one might expect in an outdoor event), but instead were acting ‘on mic’ as is normal for a radio play. The concept of an audience ‘snooping’ a radio-play recording rather than radio taking a recording of a theatre show means that Sound By Design’s task to allow the 1500 strong audience to hear is made even more difficult, especially with the amount of helicopters that fly over the venue each day!

Front-of-house engineer John Gale flew an array of eight, full-range Meyer Sound UPA-1P on a motor flown truss on the front of the stage and this provided flat and even coverage throughout the main body of the venue.  In the stalls area individual Meyer Sound M1D curvilinear array cabinets were used as front-fill to top up any areas that the main array could not cover, with Sound By Design’s brand new EM Acoustics EMS-81 full range cabinets covering the outer stalls. The system was measured and time aligned using SIA Smaart 6 with B&K 4007 measurement microphones, ensuring that vocal intelligibility was perfect in every seat of the venue as the performance was completely sold out.

Out front, John balanced front-of-house on a Crest X4 mixing console with outboard processing from XTA, Klark Teknik and system management from BSS. A Klark Teknik active split provided splits of all the broadcast mics to PA. Working closely with BBC Radio Balancer Keith Graham, John and Keith experimented with various microphone technique to find the best compromise in sound quality, settling with M&S decoded pairs of microphones at the front of stage with Neumann and AKG spot microphones for Foley, effects and ‘asides’.