Kenny Chesney`s Crew Tames Cowboys Stadium - Electro

Production Profile
Kenny Chesney’s Crew
Tames Cowboys Stadium
Photos By GeorgeGeorgalis
T
his year’s top country tour, Kenny Chesney,
has filled many arenas, amphitheaters, and
stadiums over the last decade. But the new
Dallas Cowboys Stadium, next to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, TX and host to last year’s Super
Bowl, is the largest. With an internal volume of
85 million cubic feet, it’s a Texas-sized challenge
to reach 80,000 seats with quality sound in a
domed stadium. It has the world’s largest retractable roof, with each support truss spanning nearly a quarter mile (twice the length of the St. Louis
Gateway Arch), making it the longest clear-span
structure on earth. Due to the venue’s sheer size,
several concerts held there since it opened last
year have been plagued by sound problems.
The stadium’s installed system is built
around Electro-Voice X-Line arrays, just like Kenny Chesney’s touring sound system, provided
by Morris Light & Sound of Murfreesboro, TN.
So for Chesney’s April appearance at Cowboys
Stadium, the natural solution was to extend the
world’s largest touring X-Line system by tapping
into the world’s largest installed X-Line sound
system.
Texas-Sized Reverb
foh
Morris president David Haskell says that the
possibility of using the two systems together
came up early in planning for the show. One influencing factor was the reverberant character of
the domed stadium’s acoustics. “This room has
an eight to eleven-second RT60,” Haskell says, “especially at lower frequencies. That much sound
swimming around, for that long, makes it very
hard to keep vocals intelligible. It cleaned up a
little when 50,000 fans showed up, and then a bit
more when we opened the roof later in the evening. But all in all we still had a six to eight-second
reverb time to overcome.”
The reverberation was compounded by the
stadium’s giant 120- by 180-foot glass doors
at each end. “Acoustically it was a huge hurdle,”
Haskell says, “The slap-back on stage was almost
1.5 seconds later.” Another factor was the enormous distance. “If we had tried to cover the entire
venue from the main stage hangs,” Haskell says,
“we would have had to project high frequency
information over 500 feet. When you figure in
the air loss over that distance, as well as the incredibly reverberant space, this was clearly a bad
idea. Plus we had heard that a couple of other
tours who had played there tried this approach,
and that there had been intelligibility issues in
John Mills, third from left, with the Kenny Chesney audio crew
28
28-30.200.1106.indd 28
JUNE 2011
the distant seats.”
Working with EV tech support Application
Engineers Stu Schatz and George Georgallis,
Morris system engineer John Mills formulated
a plan to address the challenge. “We decided
that we would have the most control possible
by focusing all of our stage line array energy on
the floor and first bowl seating areas,” Mills says.
“The second tier was mostly boxes, so we had
most of the glass faces there removed to minimize bounce or reflections. The final piece of the
puzzle was tying into the house X-Line and XLC
speaker hangs.”
With that general approach in mind, the
team contacted Cowboys Stadium audio engineer Gary French about tying into the house
system, which was designed and installed in
collaboration between Kevin Day of Dallas consultants Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams
(WJHW), and Demetrius Palavos and Ted Leamy
from systems integrators Pro Media / UltraSound
of Hercules, California. “Gary and all of the guys at
the stadium were very excited that we wanted to
use the house delay system,” Mills says, “because
no other tour had tried that before. Gary was extremely helpful, not only with information, but
also he was there at a moment’s notice during
our load-in and setup to help with the integration.”
Thanks to Kenny Chesney’s production manager, tour veteran Ed Wannebo, the crew had
two full days of setup time before show day. Mills
says that a touring system is typically loaded into
the venue the day before the show, but “because
this was the first time a touring system was tied
into the house system, the venue and our tour
management were very gracious and allowed us
an additional day. The major part of one of those
days was dedicated solely to integrating the two
systems.”
The Setup
foh
The main arrays for the concert were 20-box
left and right hangs, composed of 18 X-Line Xvls
cabinets above two X-Line Xvlt down-fill cabinets. “The X-Lines were chosen for their horsepower and accuracy,” Mills says. “It’s is a very powerful speaker and covered the room very well.
And with 20 boxes deep, we had significant control down to 100 Hz, which was very helpful in
such a challenging acoustic environment.” X-Line
arrays were also used for 16-box side hangs, consisting of 14 Xvls boxes and two Xvlt down-fills.
Morris Light &
Sound Combines Touring
and Installed Electro-Voice
X-Line Systems
The X-Line arrays were supplemented by
two 20-box columns of Xsubs hung center stage
above the video wall. “Hanging 20 deep and two
columns wide gave us a very powerful and controlled bass wave, which was really necessary in
this space,” Mills says. The center hang minimized
low-frequency fingering and comb filtering to
smooth out coverage. “To help smooth out the
dispersion, we applied a little delay to the top
and bottom of the array, which we modeled with
EV’s LAPS software. Even though the room had
such a long RT, we were able to get a full sound
that remained punchy.”
The system was powered by 110 of the 134
EV P3000 amplifiers that travel with the Chesney
tour. “We use the P3000RL with RCM-24 DSP and
control modules,” Mills says. “In a system of this
size, the ability to not only monitor but also control the amplifiers is paramount. With IRIS-Net
and the RCM cards, we have the ability to see everything. A single amplifier may be overheating
or there may be a short in a cable to a speaker
zone that we’re not even listening to. IRIS-Net will
throw an error light and give us a system report,
so we can determine if the error is something to
be addressed instantly or if it’s something cautionary that we can address later in the shop.”
Five EV NetMax N8000 digital controllers
provided system control for the Chesney show.
“We used two at stage left, two at stage right,
and one at FOH,” Mills says. A fifth FOH NetMax
was added for this year’s tour to allow its digital
inputs to be fed from the AES outs of the Midas
Pro9 FOH console, as well as from support-act
consoles, using the NetMax digital outs to create
an all-digital drive system. “Since we’ve already
got our old analog drive snake we’ll continue to
run that as backup.”
“The fifth NetMax also allows me to set up
and tune the system before the FOH consoles
are set up,” Mills adds. The FOH NetMax is sometimes used for delay tower processing as well as
routing. For the DCS setup, the FOH NetMax was
used to interconnect with the stadium system.
“We utilized eight of the NetMax’s analog drive
lines to drive 12 of the stadium’s 14 XLC line arrays, which cover the upper bowl, as well as three
of the stadium’s 10 X-Line hangs, which provided
rear delay coverage for seating in the far endzone,” Mills says. “Having those eight drive lines
allowed us to process the house arrays independently, which proved to be an amazing help as
we walked around the upper-level seating with
1 of 4 Cowboys Stadium amp rooms with EV TG-5 & TG-7 amplifiers
our tablet computer.”
Even though the house system is timed and
aligned to the Texan star on the 50‐yard line,
there was enough forethought in the system
design to allow it to be reconfigured. The biggest
challenge was aligning the two end-zone X‐Line
arrays to the main system — these arrays are firing down at the 100‐ to 300‐level seating and
are angled out about 35 degrees to match the
seating area. We ended up aligning to the on‐
axis point of the array and adjusting levels and
tuning to best match the main system. It wasn’t
perfect — at the outer edges of the coverage you
could start to hear some time alignment issues to
the main system — but it was far better than not
using the house arrays.
“The physical arrangement of the house XLine was not optimal for timing it to the stage
PA,” Mills notes. “But the only available position
for our own XLC delay towers would have meant
firing them directly into glass on the box seats
and the back wall. With the stadium’s end-zone
hangs we were instead able to shoot down into
the crowd, which acted as acoustic treatment. So
using the house X-Lines allowed us to eliminate
major reflections.”
“The Xlc arrays covering the 400‐level seats
worked very well because they are so close to
the seating — a few of us commented that the
cheap seats may have had better sound than
some of the more expensive seats. The LF in the
400‐level seats wasn’t great, but certainly was
acceptable.”
One Final Check
foh
“On the morning of show day, we decided to
play a track at what would be normal show level
for the Kenny Chesney show — somewhere between 97 and 100 dBA — with the room empty.
We were able to distinguish the first couple of
kick‐drum hits, then everything fell apart in the
LF and it sounded like pink noise — more looks
of panic and muttered expletives. From what we
could determine, 90 dBA was about the loudest
you could go in an empty room before the room
ate your lunch. We encouraged all of the FOH engineers to start low and work up in level.”
The other suggestion made was to EQ the
kick drum different than normal — instead of trying to get a bump at 40‐60 Hz, move the bump
up to the 80‐ to 100‐Hz range. This would help
get around some of the room’s low-frequency
reverb time issues and still allow for some of the
ASUS Eee Slate Tablet PC running EV IRIS-Net for wireless system control
www.fohonline.com
6/4/11 12:50 AM
felt frequencies.
When the first band went on, there were
about 35,000 people in the house. The FOH
engineer kept the level around 90 dBA and it
sounded just fine — the bodies in the room
helped dampen the acoustics considerably. By
the time Kenny Chesney went on, there were
about 60,000 people in the house and the FOH
engineer was able to run at about 93 dBA without the room getting away from him.
Despite its complexity, the combined system
yielded an impressive result, particularly considering the acoustical characteristics of the space.
“We received rave reviews,” Haskell says. “Some
even said we set a new standard for tours to
come. And we couldn’t have done it without the
support from EV, which is unrivaled by any manufacturer we’ve ever worked with. Stu Schatz
and George Georgallis were instrumental in programming, EASE modeling, and on-site support.
We received their undivided attention on this
project. Big job or small, they always treat us as if
we were their only client.”
Other Chesney stadium shows this summer
include Green Bay’s Lambeau Field (June 11),
Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field (June 18),
Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field (July 2), Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium (July 30), Detroit’s Ford Field
(Aug. 20) and Foxboro’s Gillette Stadium (Aug.
27).
Production Manager Ed Wannebo will be
presented the live event industry’s highest honor, the Parnelli Lifetime Achievement Award, at
the gala dinner and ceremony to be held Saturday, Oct. 29, in Orlando during LDI.
jim messer
Production Profile
Audio Crew Chief/System Engineer:
John Mills
FOH Mix Engineer: Bryan Vasquez
Monitor Engineer: Phill “Side Phill” Robinson Band Engineer: Bryan “Opie” Baxley
Stage Patch: Jameson “Jamo” Beck
Asst. System Tech: Justin Meeks
Stage Right PA: Phill Spina
Stage Left PA: Robert McTigue
Kenny Chesney Gear:
3
Midas PRO9 digital consoles (FOH, Band, KC)
5
EV NetMax N8000-1500 digital controllers
134
EV P3000RL amps with RCM-24 DSP modules
48
EV X-Line sub-woofers
72
EV X-Line line array modules
1
APB-DynaSonics MixSwitch
1
PreSonus FireStudio 8-channel PC interface
1
Klark-Teknik DN9696 multi-track recorder
1
Lectrosonics Venue UHF wireless receiver
4
Lectrosonics HM UHF plug-on transmitters
5
Audix TM-1 measurement microphones
1
MacBook Pro with Rational Acoustics SMAART 7, HowLoudIsIt.
com’s TREND SPL reporting software
1
ASUS Eee Slate EP121 Tablet PC running Windows7, EV IRIS-Net for main system wireless control
1
Mac Mini running Parallels Desktop & EV IRIS-Net
for system monitoring and backup control computer
(various) Ruckus wireless access points running a mesh net
work for venue wide wireless control. Provided by
Connect802.com
Cowboys Stadium Gear:
5
EV NetMax N8000-1500 digital controllers
176
EV TG-7 amplifiers with RCM-26 DSP modules
52
EV TG-5 HF amplifiers with RCM-26 DSP modules
104
EV X-Line line array modules
EV XLC line array modules
112
30
28-30.200.1106.indd 30
JUNE 2011
www.fohonline.com
6/4/11 12:51 AM