USA - In June, for the first time since 2019, Starbucks convened its Leadership Experience conference, bringing together more than 14,500 of its store managers and other Starbucks leaders at Thomas & Mack Centre in Las Vegas. The three-day gathering included breakouts and workshops, keynote speakers, competitions, live musical performances, all backed by a large-scale Cohesion audio system.
FOH engineer Andrew Waterman, who also serves as account manager for global brands Starbucks and Microsoft, was entrusted to select the PA. “I’ve done a lot of events lately with Cohesion, and the sound and the coverage have been amazing,” he said. “It’s just so smooth and good sounding. It’s a team effort, and I think James [Ellison, system engineer] has done an amazing job with the design, so my hat’s off, for sure.”
The system comprised two rings, one for the lower bowl and a delay ring for the upper bowl. The lower ring included two hangs of 14 Cohesion CO10, with the top four enclosures using 80° horizontal dispersion inserts and the bottom 10 enclosures using 120° inserts, four hangs of 10 CO10 (all 80° inserts), and two hangs of eight CO10 (all 120° inserts).
“I’m loving the CO10,” said Waterman. “I truly appreciate the effort that goes into making a great speaker, and this line has some incredible work behind it.”
The delay ring used 16 clusters of eight Cohesion CO8 with 120° inserts. “The CO8 made more sense logistically as a lighter box,” said Ellison. “It was also nice to have the internal angles of a smaller box that allowed us to achieve the coverage we needed in the upper bowl.”
For additional low end, 18 Cohesion CP218 II+ were flown in standard configuration in six clusters of three each. A dozen Cohesion CM14 were used as stage monitors, both for the keynote speakers and for the artists. ATK Audiotek, a Clair Global brand, deployed the PA, which totalled nearly three hundred enclosures.
“The number of enclosures we used and the layout of them were all about the control. Since presenters used lavaliers, we needed to be able to run the whole system at a lower level,” explained Ellison. “We needed to control for feedback and provide excellent clarity. We were sitting at 80–85 dBA, so we needed more hangs to compensate for the throw distance.
“The lower bowl and the upper bowl were completely independent, which meant the whole system was configurated as a more distributed system to maintain that control we needed. If we were only doing music, we’d have only done a main ring of speakers, a normal 360°, but in this case, it’s all about that lavalier. It was a fundamental rethinking of how we approached this content differently than a music performance.”
