Recognising artists from China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, the Golden Melody Awards is the Chinese speaking territories’ pre-eminent music event and sets the regional standard for stage design, audio support, lighting and visuals.

For the Award’s 28th edition, Winly Engineering & Trading was tasked with designing and supplying an L-Acoustics sound reinforcement system that would provide superb coverage for the challenging environment of this year’s host venue, the Taipei Arena.

Winly has worked on the Golden Melody Awards (GMAs) since they began two decades ago, and invested considerable time in the design and preparation of a system that would serve the venue’s deep, yet narrow configuration, basing the design on L-Acoustics K1, K2, Kara and SB28.

‘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 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 ten 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 75m at its furthest point, while the K2s were angled downwards to cover the majority of the arena floor. Out fills of two hangs of eight Kara each covered the seating areas to the sides and further hangs of six Kara down fills 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,’ says 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,’ Chen concludes. ‘Everyone was impressed with the directivity control, even coverage and tonal balance of the L-Acoustics system for every seat in the Arena.’