SSE Hire
Madness All Around at the O2
SSE Hire's Rob Hughes reports on the final gig of the Madness 2007 Tour.
Photography: ©J Cumpsty 2008
At about this time each year Madness sets in as Suggs and his reliably entertaining Camden ska-punk veterans set out to surpass the performances of the previous year’s tour. This year's tour was no different, with each arena full of eager and faithful madness fans always up for a good time – and a good time they had.
The twist at the end of the tour was a sell out show at London’s new O2 arena – in the round. Performing their show in the round at such a large and tall arena as the O2 provided some interesting challenges, not least from a sound perspective.
SSE Hire immediately realised that to achieve good even coverage for the whole audience – all around and at a wide range of heights – would require a huge amount of additional equipment to supplement the L-Acoustics V-Dosc arena system with Nexo CD18 sub bass cabinets used on the rest of the tour.
Virtual Sound Design
SSE Project Manager Miles Hillyard designed a system for the O2 using the L-Acoustics ‘Soundvision’ prediction/system design software. This enables a system to be designed in a virtual environment, showing coverage and placement of the PA and ensuring the correct rig plots are drawn up prior to the event. It’s now an essential tool for today’s modern line-array systems.
The final box count for the show was 60 flown V-Dosc cabinets, 42 flown DV-Dosc cabinets, 16 flown SB218 sub bass cabinets, 24 ground stacked Nexo CD18 sub bass cabinets, with 12 DV-Dosc cabinets ground stacked for in fill. This was flown via 16 motor hoists, and 4 additional motor hoists used as cable picks to tidy the large volume of speaker cabling needed to power such a large system.
Eliminating cable drops
With the system flown in the round, cable drops from the system to the ground had to be eliminated, as they would interfere with audience sight-lines. The entire system was powered by amp racks installed in the roof structure, allowing the large system to remain unobtrusive and keeping all sight-lines clear.
The monitor system was also a grand affair, with 24 SSE MB4 wedge monitors, 4 SB218 subs and 8 Arcs cabinets used on stage, along with an extensive Sennheiser in-ear monitoring system, with around 60 outputs from the monitor desk in total!
Monitor engineer Chris Wade-Evans opted for a Digico D5 digital mixing console for the tour, allowing for total control of such a large monitor system, although he decided to utilise external EQ for the tour, and used a TC EQ station system, with flying fader remote all inserted on AES to keep signal paths pure.
Monitoring a revolving stage
He also had to cope with a rotating stage, which rotated a full 360 degrees and then reversed direction and rotated back the other way a full 360 degrees. This meant that all monitor and signal cabling had to be run through the centre of the stage to keep them tidy and untangled.
FOH engineer Ian Horne also opted for a Digico D5 for the tour with system control provide via a standard SSE Digital Drivestation. This handled the system distribution and then fed into a series of XTA processors, which acted as the crossovers for the large L-Acoustics system.
All in a day’s work
The most impressive things about the show install was that despite the large number of cabinets and hangs and all the other challenging elements of a show of this size, the whole production was installed and removed in a single day, with only six SSE crew looking after the whole PA system – despite the madness they truly did a fantastic job!
