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HPSS provide sound system for XLS and XLC youth events at York Minster
After successfully providing sound for several events in difficult acoustic spaces e.g. Beverley Minster / Holy Trinity (Hull). HPSS were approached by Rev. Philip Ball with a view to providing sound for a 2-night youth event at York Minster. Previous years had seen mixed results with respect to sound at the event, something which Rev. Ball & HPSS were keen to improve upon.
Given the context of the event, vocal clarity was of paramount importance however the FOH PA system & Monitor system still needed to cope with the usual demands of live bands. Given the ‘lively’ and extremely lengthy nature of the acoustic in York Minster the only real option was to implement a distributed PA system across the venue.
Drawing on experience from similar events engineers Iain Firth & Dave Cartwright specified a system utilising –
FOH Speaker System split L/R driven by Camco Vortex amplifiers:
6x L-Acoustic ARC’s
4x L-Acoustic SB218’s
Distributed Speaker System driven by 2x Racks of Camco Vortex amplifiers each with BSS Soundweb 9088ii processors:
4x L-Acoustic 115XT
4x L-Acoustic 115XT HiQ
4x HPSS 15”+ 1”
The above was driven by a Yamaha M7-CL and BSS Crossovers at FOH. At FOH to further assist with mixing in a highly reverberant space a pair of Genelec 8030A nearfield studio monitors were used from hire stock. These were delays to the FOH speakers using the internal delays on the M7CL.
The monitor system comprised a further 10× 115XT HiQ’s from our hire stock and a second Yamaha M7-CL with 2× 8-Channel Analogue IO cards (to enable the use of KT DN360’s as inserts).
All rigging of the PA system, and sound checking took place on the Thursday prior to the event. System alignment and sound checks took place in the evening after services had finished in the Minster. HPSS liaised with the Minster throughout the whole event to ensure that all work carried out was as sympathetic as possible to the daily running of the Minster both as a tourist attraction and a place of worship.
The Friday night event saw bands The Gentleman, Good Question and Redemption Gospel Choir all appearing on stage along with DJ Ayo and other speakers from the event. As M7CL’s were used on both FOH and Monitors changeovers were able to happen fast and seamlessly keeping the event running smoothly and with complete continuity through from Sound check the night before through to the event on the Friday.
All key speakers at the event were provided with DPA 4066 headset microphones and Shure ULX Radio Systems from our hire stock to ensure the highest possible quality of spoken word throughout the venue.
The Saturday night event saw Fischy Music performing on stage with a Choir comprised of local children. Again DPA headsets were used on the main performers to ensure clear vocals and speech throughout the whole venue. The two nights events ran extremely smoothly and the de-rig was suitably fast ensuring the Minster was clear around an hour after the final event finished. Both the Minster and Rev. Phil Ball were very happy with the results:
“To amplify sound loud enough for a pop/rock/youth event in a clear, pleasant, audible way is a great challenge in a very reverberant building such as York Minster. Iain from HPSS took on this challenge with great attention to detail – choosing the highest quality equipment, computer modelling speaker positions and delays to achieve the optimum effect, then installing the equipment and rigorously testing and tweaking it to ensure it worked in practice.
The results were impressive, so much so that the head verger of the Minster commented at last we’ve worked out how to do sound well. (That is after seven years of doing the event using various other companies).
Iain and the team were courteous, helpful and worked well to the event manager’s requirements. I would thoroughly recommend them to any one else.” – Revd P. Ball, XLS Technical Co-ordinator
FOH Engineer for the event was Iain Firth with Dave Cartwright on Monitors and Chris Crowther was on Systems duty for the three days. Dave would like to point out that the highlight of the event for him was what we believe to be a world first… a Mime Artist Monitor Engineer or MAME for short.