Ennio Morricone, the only film composer to receive the honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, has embarked on his 60 Years of Music world tour, with an L‑Acoustics audio system supplied by Italian rental company, Agorà.
Early in the tour, Morricone’s long time recording and FOH engineer Fabio Venturi and Agora project manager Giulio Rovelli heard about the new L-Acoustics L-ISA immersive sound system and visited the L-ISA headquarters in London for a presentation and to test the mixing platform with Fabio’s own recorded material. “Our normal L‑Acoustics configuration works extremely well. But in places such as arenas, it’s difficult to achieve exactly what we want, and since the very first concert, we’ve been looking at ways to make the performance sound even more natural,” Rovelli stated. “When I listened to L-ISA, I felt that it offered a more natural and detailed sound. I discussed the system with the production team, and we decided we wanted to use it.”
The team decided to use the system, designed by Scott Willsallen of Auditoria Pty, working alongside Sherif El Barbari, Director of L-ISA Labs, and Fabio for both the Bologna and Milano dates. At the 8,600-seat Unipol Arena in Bologna, an A/B comparison between a conventional stereo system, which featured 12 L-Acoustics K2 per side, and an L‑ISA system featuring 5 rows of 12 L-Acoustics Kara across the stage was conducted. The production team felt that the L-ISA setup delivered far superior results in terms of localisation, clarity and mix details. Within a few minutes, it was unanimously validated by the Maestro and his team.
The following day in Milano, the L-ISA system was again deployed in the 12,700-seat Mediolanum Assago arena. There, the L‑ISA system comprised 5 arrays of 12 Kara across the stage, completed by 2 side extension to widen the imaging, with the central cluster also including 2 arrays of 4 KS28. For the 240° audience seating, 2 side hangs of eight K2 and 5 additional Kara for front-fills were used.
Frederic Bailly, applications engineer at L-Acoustics was on-hand to lend support. “The Agorà team had an opportunity to ‘rehearse’ the L‑ISA rigging deployment for the first show in Bologna. For the Milano show the next day, we ran into an unexpected challenge, as the fixed central scoreboard was not documented in the blueprints and we had to lower the PA system by 1 metre.” With 112 condenser microphones on stage for the orchestra and choir, Fabio worried about feedback, but this posed no problems as gain before feedback was in the range of 4 to 6dB. The complete PA was set-up an hour ahead of schedule and system calibration was completed by systems engineer Maxime Ménelec in 30 minutes. This meant that Fabio had plenty of time to tweak his L‑ISA mix and do the sound check, and rehearsal took place with the Maestro at 5pm without a glitch.
“The system worked perfectly for both dates and was an overall positive experience,” said Floris Douwes, producer and managing director of the tour’s production company GEA. “The L-ISA system guarantees an immersive sound for the entire audience, which is a tremendous improvement, and offers much more transparency of sound than with conventional stereo line-array systems.”
Morricone concluded: “The L-ISA multi-channel system adds a sense of space to the sound. This has made it possible for Fabio and Agorà to reproduce my performance with a surprisingly realistic sound image of the orchestra. More than ever before, there was a clear feeling of being enveloped by the music.”