Recognised by the Chinese music industry with Best Mandarin Album at the Annual Pop Music Awards, Taiwanese pop queen Jolin Tsai’s took her album Play on the road with her Play World Tour. After three highly successful days in the Taipei Arena, the tour moved to the Chinese Mainland.
The production spared nothing – concert directors who had worked with Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga were brought in to create an audiovisual spectacle, while MSI Japan handled sound production. Martin Audio’s MLA system was chosen for the Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou leg of the tour. With more than 30 years of live sound mixing experience, FOH engineer Yukihiko Soka explains why: ‘In my experience, all other array systems encounter problems with sound consistency both within a venue and on every stop of a tour,’ he says. ‘Given that this tour would visit so many different types of venue in quick succession, the time required to set up, configure and test a traditional array would not have been possible and so would have impacted the quality of the tour.
‘The unique optimising software provided with MLA and the multi-cellular array design itself has perfectly solved the problems of consistent sound. This means our mixing output can be delivered to every corner of the audience area with amazing accuracy and consistency, which was totally unimaginable before.’
Beijing Capital Gymnasium represented the greatest sound challenge of the tour – well known for its difficult acoustics. This was coupled with a tour production that has a four-sided stage facing grandstands on all axes, and the necessity for the sound to reach the audience in all sectors with constant SPL and coverage. In addition, the main mixing area was less than 10m from the stage, which placed a great challenge on the whole PA system set-up. With so much time spent on the production of the stage itself there was little time for the rigging and testing of the sound system.
‘Traditional array design would have meant predicting a result first, and then making tweaks in the software, and then having to wait for the software to carry out another design, and so on,’ Yasuhiko Watanabe explains. ‘But MLA Display software just reverses the sequence. You start with what you want to achieve and the software works in reverse to automatically calculate the DSP parameters for each individual acoustic cell. As mixing engineers and system engineers, we only need to consider the artistic results, and leave the technical details to the computer – this is a great innovation of workflow.’
The sound system comprised an array of 11 MLA and an MLD (Downfill) on each flank of the sides facing the wider grandstand, plus an array of nine MLA on each flank of the sides facing the narrower grandstand. There were also three MLX subwoofers on each flank on every side of the stage.
Due to the importance of this tour, MSI founder and Chariman Shuzo Fujii, and GM Motoshige Nishio accompanied the tour throughout and took the opportunity to develop a new alliance: ‘MSI will keep expanding in Asia, especially in China, where the performing market is doing so well,’ Nishio says. ‘For this reason, MSI has formed a strategic alliance with Pacific Budee [distributor for Martin Audio in both live sound and commercial projects in China, Hong Kong and Macao] and we will jointly promote the system together.’
On the night of the performance, stunning lights, stage animatronics and special effects, constantly changing costumes and makeup, along with five mini films, ensured the fans were enthralled and entertained. The wide scope of Jolin Tsai’s concert repertoire – ranging from EDM to Mozart arias – gave MLA the opportunity to display its versatility.
