Opened in 1996, Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall is not only one of the UK’s leading regional venues but also a recognised international concert hall hosting more than 250 classical, rock, pop, jazz, and world music performances a year including its own classical music season, the International Concert Series. It is also home to no less than three orchestras, the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata.
In common with many comparable venues it has its own house sound system, in this case a Meyer Sound M-series design originally installed about ten years ago. As is often the way with venues whose programmes embrace many styles of music, the sound system had been augmented with additional loudspeakers and control gear over the years and whilst it was fully functional it was somewhat overdue for a major service.
Pro Audio Systems were approached to undertake the work, as Meyer Sound’s agents for the north of England, and were of course delighted to assist. The first part of the project involved a thorough audit of the cabling and signal integrity throughout the system, working with the Hall’s Head Of Sound, David Eley.
Once satisfied that everything was connected properly it was time to deploy our Meyer Sound SIM 3 technology – the capabilities of this extraordinary device far exceed the space available here so if you’d like to know more then please click HERE. Essentially it integrates the physical dimensions and characteristics of a given space with the performance parameters of the loudspeakers within it, thus optimising every aspect of the loudspeaker system.
The data gathered and analysed by our SIM 3 allowed us to reprogram the Meyer Sound Galileo system processor such that all elements of the loudspeaker system are correctly time-aligned and phase-coherent. This provides a ‘baseline’ setting from which derivative settings can be developed according to applications whilst retaining the essential alignments and integration characteristics of the equipment.
Shortly after our work was completed David Eley said, ‘Thank you Pro Audio Systems for your services in re-aligning and calibrating our Meyer Sound PA System. We found the engineers to be highly professional with great experience and knowledge in the field. All our questions were confidently answered and our system now performs very well.’
‘Since the calibration, we have had some very positive feedback from some of our long serving clients – one particular engineer said, ‘Whatever you’ve done to the system, do not change it!’. An acoustic orchestra concert with amplified vocals was the first test of the new configuration. The sound was more open with more sonic detail than ever before. Since then, many touring rock gigs which use a mixture of our Meyer System and their own gear have proved to be very impressive in sonic quality, and massively more simple in terms of tuning and aligning. We are all very happy with the results of Pro Audio Systems’ work on our Meyer System.’
http://www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk
