L-Acoustics tames challenges of Taipei Arena for Golden Melody Awards

posted:

02/11/2017

Organised by the Ministry of Culture for Taiwan, the Golden Melody Awards (GMAs) is the Chinese speaking territories’ biggest and most prestigious music awards, with nominations open to artists from countries including China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong and has set the region’s standard for stage design, audio, lighting and visuals. For the Award’s 28th edition, Winly Engineering & Trading was tasked with designing and supplying an L-Acoustics system that would provide superb coverage for the challenging environment of this year’s host venue, the Taipei Arena.

Winly has worked on the GMAs since they started two decades ago and is fully aware of the importance of this most prestigious event and spent a considerable amount of time prior to the event on the design and preparation of a system that could cope with the venue’s deep, yet narrow configuration, basing the design on L-Acoustics K1, K2, Kara and SB28.

Winly’s president and production manager for the event, Andy Chen.

“A big challenge for the system design was the shape of the venue, its limited rigging possibilities and the fact that the production requested no fill system in front of the stage,” says Winly’s president and production manager for the event, Andy Chen. “With the help of L-Acoustics’ Alvin Koh, we made an initial design of the system with L-Acoustics 3D acoustical simulation programme, Soundvision, to provide us with the optimum result.”

With the need for clean sightlines, and therefore no option to incorporate delays, the final design comprised two main hangs of six K1 plus 10 K2, one each positioned left and right of the stage. The K1s at the top of the hangs covered the raked seating at the rear of the arena, which extends to a distance of approximately 75 metres at its furthest point, whilst the K2s were angled downwards to cover the majority of the arena floor. Outfills of two hangs of eight Kara each covered the seating areas to the sides and further hangs of six Kara downfills handle the VIP area directly in front of the stage.

“There were many restrictions, one of which was that the main PA had to be pushed forward to provide better sightlines for the stage design,” adds sound engineer Mike Li. “All the subs were also flown to clear the sightlines, with two arrays of six SB28 per side hung in a ‘cannon’ configuration – one hang in front of the other, offset in the vertical - to provide all the sub harmonics needed for the venue, while achieving great control on the stage area. We knew that by choosing this combination we would be able to deliver the audio requirements for the event.”

“Thanks to Alvin’s assistance and valuable system design advice, despite all the challenges and restrictions, we produced an optimized design for the event,” concludes Andy Chen. “Everyone was impressed with the directivity control, even coverage and tonal balance of the L-Acoustics system for every seat in the Arena.”