May Issue - FOH Online

Whitehorse, Yukon, with its population
of 23,000, has a cozy, small-
town feel, as people have time to
chat, and cars stop for people to cross the
street even if the traffic light is green. This
city is also one of the best places to see the
mysterious phenomenon called the Northern
Lights or Aurora Borealis. During a clear
winter night when there is a high level of
solar wind, the electrons discharge like florescent
lights, and tourists come from all
over the world hoping to see the sky light
up in green swirls.
When the 2007 Canada Winter Games
were awarded to the city of Whitehorse,
they said they would put on the biggest
show north of the 60th parallel. What they
didn’t say was that it would be the coldest
Canada Winter Games ever. Daytime temperatures
during the games ranged from
minus 27°F (minus 33°C) to minus 40°F (minus
40°C).
The biggest challenges for the games
were keeping costs low while maximizing
their value to the community of Whitehorse.
To help reduce costs, a two-and-ahalf
week spring break was scheduled to
coincide with the games so that students
could volunteer. In the end, more than 4000
volunteers were recruited. Families rented
their homes not only to show their warm
16
Production Profile
K e e p U n t i l
S h o w
By TonyMah
MAY 2007
Yukon hospitality, but also to alleviate the
shortage of hotel space.
The organizing committee needed to
build a venue that was large enough to host
the opening and closing ceremonies. Rather
than build a permanent facility that would
have been empty once the games were
over, the committee decided to construct a
44,000-square-foot heated tent. The temperature
in the “heated” tent rose to only 48°F
(9°C). This was warm enough to keep equipment
like DSP processors, speakers and
mixing consoles within safe operating conditions,
but the crew were seen dressed in
outdoor winter clothing, huddled near personal
heaters or competing for spots near
the heating tubes throughout the show.
The opening and closing ceremonies
were one-off shows, but because Whitehorse
is so far, north it takes a week to truck
the gear from Vancouver. This meant that the
organizing committee had to rent the gear
for a month. ProShow, one of Vancouver’s
premier full service Audio/Visual providers,
supplied all the audio for the ATCO Centre
tent. Mark Fisher and Benoit Laurence from
Proshow oversaw the project and made sure
everyone stayed happy.
“The gig is a typical corporate show,”
says Fisher, except for the extreme cold and
the extra planning to make sure nothing was
Forget the Plow,
Build a Speaker
The Michigan Tech Audio Engineering
Society recently built a nearly-
20,000-watt speaker array made of
snow. Yes snow, the white fluffy stuff that
falls from the sky. It seems they needed
mega audio power for Michigan Tech’s
Winter Carnival, which has a competition
for impressive snow sculptures.
The university AES group used computer
modeling to design the horns as
well as the line-array speaker configuration,
building them from formed snow
and wood. The audio source came from
an optical output of a student’s computer,
which ran into two Behringer DCX2496
speaker management systems. The speakers
were powered by nine Behringer
EP2500 amps and one Crown XLS602.
The snow array had front and rear
firing sections for covering the campus.
The front pointing speakers consisted of
eight Selenium 2-inch dome compression
drivers with 1-inch throat horns, 16
5-inch sealed back MCM cone drivers, six
Selenium 15-inch drivers using a 4-foot
deep snow horn with 4-foot by 8-foot
mouth and 7-foot by 2-inch throat, plus
six ElectroVoice 18-inch drivers using a
15-foot deep snow horn with 15-foot by
6-foot mouth and an 18-inch throat. The
rear-pointing speakers consisted of three
Eminence 2-inch dome compression drivers
with 1-inch throat horns, and the lows
were six Selenium/EV 15-inch drivers (not
horn loaded).
The amazing snow array took between
six and 15 AES members about four hours
per night for three weeks to complete. According
to Tommy Bartlet, one of the project
members, it made quite a great dance system
for the carnival party, which went into
the early morning hours. “We pushed the
nine EP2500’s just into clipping from 7 p.m.
to 4 a.m. with no problems, even in freezing
conditions. There’s nothing like seeing the
red clip lights blink on nine EP2500s.” Police
were reported to have had complaints from
three miles away due to the volume.
www.fohonline.com
For the 2007 Canadian Winter Games they only heated
the venue enough to keep the FOH gear operational. . .
missing. “That far north you can’t just call the
shop and ask for something you forgot.” To
keep the costs reasonable, all the gear was
owned by Proshow and there were no crossrentals
or outboard gear. Local volunteers
helped unload, and when local providers
didn’t have the appropriate gear Craig Marcuk,
a local freelancer, was hired.
To avoid having to fly in a big crew,
Fisher, Laurence and Marcuk spent two long
days setting up the sound system. While everyone
had different roles, the entire crew of
sound, lights, video projection and staging
were willing to help each other out. Three
stages ran the length of the tent. Hanging
from each side of centerstage were eight
Meyer M’elodie speakers and a pair of Meyer
Rehearsal for the opening ceremonies
700HP subs, processed by a Meyer Galileo.
Extreme left and right each had a pair of
EAW KF650E speakers and a single Meyer
650P subwoofer. Fisher used 10 Electro-
Voice Sx300s for front fill and 10 more for
delays for the bleachers. Floor wedges were
five mixes run through eight EAW SM200s.
All the conventional boxes were powered by
14 QSC PLX amps and processed with three
dbx Driverack 4800s.
Fisher and his crew used SMAART to set
the tent’s delays and EQ the conventional
boxes to match the M’elodies. With the three
stages being so long, instead of delaying
all the fill speakers to FOH, Fisher set up his
delays by putting his measurement microphone
in front of each delay speaker along
The front pointing speakers under construction