Fatboy Slim in the round with MLA
- Details
“All of a sudden with the DJ booth in the middle you forget you’re in a big arena. We worked out that’s a way of turning an arena into a huge nightclub,” Cook had declared in an interview. “You get all the benefits of collective euphoria with the budget to do a very big production.”
When he later announced his biggest arena tour yet, with six dates fittingly called The Round Trip, complete with revolving stage in the centre, circular overhead video, confetti cannons and pyro, Capital decided to extend this ‘boxing match meets rave’ concept by increasing the ordnance of the PA.
To pull off this production, including the largest DJ show ever seen at Wembley’s SSE Arena, Capital - in the shape of house engineer/project manager David Preston and system tech Marty Beath - had to meet a number of challenges, notably the location of the mix position (30m from the mother grid, near the conventional monitor world), while fighting with the vast amount of overhead hardware.
Conway explains, “Whereas last time we fielded four hangs of four MLA and two hangs of MLA Compact, this time we have had six hangs of MLA above the video screen, as close to the centre as possible, so there is a lot more real estate.” The speakers had to be trimmed 10m from the floor to preserve sightlines.
But the most complicated element was the subs. This comprised a flown MLX system - four independent hangs with five elements in each hang, right above the DJ’s head. “These were all positioned close together, firing inwards, to create a perfect omnidirectional sub source.”
Eight Martin Audio DD12s were also deployed, two on each side of the square stage, for front-fills.
“This design is highly efficient and for this application it was perfect - there’s no comb filtering because it’s essentially one single source. I’m a huge fan of this design, it really works well, and Marty managed to achieve extremely good coverage.”
(Jim Evans)
