For Front of House Engineer Phil Wright, this latest Classical Spectacular represented his first time working on the show.
"I was delighted to be asked by RG Jones to join the Classical Spectacular family," Wright says. "The show is one of the most respected of its genre and there is certainly no room for error – audience and artist expectations are very high."
Making the decision to move to
d:fine™ Headset Microphones meant that the singers had much more freedom of movement and could better express their characters. In previous performances they were positioned in front of microphones on stands, which naturally limited their movement around the stage.
"I wanted to go over to radio mics, but without a proscenium arch I knew I’d have trouble with omnis in their hairlines," Wright says.
The answer was to use the
d:fine™ Omnidirectional Headset Microphones mounted on a short boom, set back from the singer's mouth, but close enough to give the required separation.
"Once I’d made the case for the mics visually, the production team was more than happy with the sound in rehearsals and subsequent shows," Wright says. "The performers were happier, too, with the comfort of the d:fine™ Headset and the sound they got back. It was a real win-win situation."
Acoustically, Wright singles out for praise the transparency of
d:fine™ Headset Microphones and the lack of overload artefacts – an important consideration when dealing with a sound source as dynamic as an opera voice.
"We used two headsets, one on each singer, with a Shure UHF-R radio system utilising the URM-1 miniature packs," he says. "I also had a d:screet™ 4061 Miniature Microphone on a second system as a backup in the event of a microphone or radio system failure. The RF performed impeccably. The show also used a Digico SD-7 console with dual-redundant Waves servers and Martin Audio MLA as its PA system."