Seeking out a single vocalist from initial blind auditions through 40 TV show contestants, The Voice Norway 2015 found its winner in Yvonne Nordvik Siversten. Held at the H3 Arena in Fornebu, the show recordings used a sound system from Vue Audiotechnik, designed and installed by avonlyd as.
Led by Åsmund Knutson, the core of The Voice Norway 2015 band featured drums, bass, keyboards, two guitar players and three backing vocalists, with strings, horns and additional background vocals for songs with larger arrangements. It was essential that the 1,200-capacity venue was evenly and effectively covered by the PA.
‘TV shows are very different from concerts,’ says avon founder and systems engineer, Edgar Andraa Lien. ‘It’s important that the audience responds favourably to the singers, the music and the mentors. At the same time, we must be sure not to interfere with the broadcast sound, and of course the producer does not want the PA to be visible on-camera.
‘Instead of a typical LR speaker hang, we had an increased number of smaller hangs pointing toward the audience (who were seated around the stage) and the mentors. Javed Kurd, the show’s music producer, and I were very pleased with the results.’
Kurd also notes that the placement of the speakers and the choice of Vue components improved the mixing process: ‘The PA itself sounded very clear and seemed to play with a phase coherency across the entire frequency range,’ he says. ‘This helped intelligibility and separation of individual sound sources in the mix.’
In cooperation with FOH engineer Tor Erik Johansen, Lien chose, a varied complement of Vue Audiotechnik loudspeakers in his system design: ‘We used six hs-28 dual 18-inch ACM subwoofers, four hangs each with four al-8 high definition line array elements, and two hangs each with one al-4SB flying subwoofer system and six al-4 subcompact line array elements. The systems were flown in a U-shaped configuration with al-4s placed at the end of the stage behind the mentors’ chairs.’
In spite of the complexity of the sound system, avon’s rigging process was efficient. ‘It was just two of us hanging the speaker arrays,’ explains Lien. ‘It took us four or five hours to get them all into place. This was done before any of the staging was rigged, in a big empty venue with riggers hanging lamps on trusses, so I had to imagine where the audience would be seated. We had to trust our planning, so that when all of the staging, seating and set were rigged, the PA system would cover the proper areas.’
All inputs from the stage went to the FOH Yamaha PM1D and Soundcraft Vi3000monitor consoles, with some of the lines subject to a four-way split. All of the band and vocal inputs were fed to the mixing suite, while the speech and audience microphones were sent to the show’s OB truck. During the blind auditions, the singers used Vue Audiotechnik hm-112 high definition stage monitors, and then for the next rounds (Duels, Knock Out and Live) they were on Shure in-ear monitors.
Handling FOH mixing duties for all of the artists performing on The Voice Norway 2015 was Johansen, engineer and co-owner of avon. ‘The FOH mixing position was situated between two al-8 hangs to provide a solid stereo image, and we placed a pair of Vue i-6a compact full range foreground systems on the PM1D console for close-field use,’ he explains. For some of the songs, band members moved from their normal positions out to the stage, in which case Johansen dealt with a total of 20 IEM systems and as many as 30 wireless microphones.
If audience reaction is any indication, then Vue Audiotechnik and avon played a valuable part in the production. Norway’s population is 5m, and in addition to the enthusiastic live audience at H3 Arena, the level of TV viewer participation was higher than ever this season, with an estimated peak of 900,000 viewers during the June 5 finale, and an average of 683,000 per broadcast.
More: www.vueaudio.com
