I've been fortunate to get to mix on some amazing PA's on this tour, from D&B J/V, L'acoustics K1/K2, to Adamson E15, and last night on Meyer Leo. The Leo rig last night was the only one that left me unsatisfied. It was 14 per side at the Paleo festival in Switzerland. I had very little time to tune, and no sound check. My measurement put it at around plus 9 in the low end and minus 3 by 4k, minus 6 at 8k. The system was being controlled by 3 Calisto's which I was not granted access to. There was a Lake I could use, but there was no tablet, the control cpu was located 10' from me, and I had to turn my back to the stage to use it.
With array correction I could have asked them to set it at 7 and know I would at least be in the ballpark. But I was apprehensive to try to replicate this on a Lake. First of all I couldn't believe that a system at a festival this large would be tuned that way. And second because the tuning often needs to change once the crowd shows up and the show starts. The way this one was set up I would have missed mix cues by going over to where the Lake control computer was.
The day on the E15 rig - 24 per side at Vielle Charrues, the largest festival in France, didn't start out sounding good, but got there in the end. Again the system tech hadn't done any array correction so there was a massive low end buildup. This worked well during the soundcheck for David Guetta, but not so well for me, mixing a folk act at 85db. After line check someone from Adamson asked if he could interview me on camera for their website. I was not in a good mood and told him that I would not make for a good interview currently because I thought their PA sounded like shit. A couple of hours later he came and found me and told me that there was an option to use an array correction filter in their Lake processing, but the system tech had opted not to because the largest array size was something like 16 boxes, and we had 24. He apologized and said he would help me get where I needed to go during changeover. He did just that and it was a pretty good show. I wouldn't put it up there with L'acoustics or D&B, but pretty close.
It seems that I keep finding new lines in the sand - new features that separate the best from the rest. A few years ago it was the use of FIR filters. Now it seems to be the simple and repeatable array correction function in a manufacturers processing. L'acoustics LA Network Manager is the hands down easiest way to get a PA tuned quickly. Between the array morphing, the FIR filters for the high end, and the IIR filters for the low end, you really don't need anything else. D&B, with CPL and air loss compensation can also get you there very quickly. Nothing else I have used can get you there fast or as phase coherently.
