For the final live telecast of Survivor: China, sound designer and lead mixing engineer Bill Daly relied on the Real Sound Lab CONEQ tuning process to equalize the PRG-supplied system. A CONEQ measurement, and the resulting 4,096-point amplitude correction, is based on acoustic power instead of SPL measurements.
According to Daly, “The usual time I allocate for system tuning with an FFT was cut in half, while the results were better than I could have imagined. On a major live telecast like Survivor, I normally allocate two nights for system tuning. With CONEQ, I was ready for rehearsals in just one. My rack of ‘emergency graphics’ was literally left untouched, as were the EQ filters on my 10 channels of XTA loudspeaker processors. The 10 channels of CONEQ correction were all that I needed. The sound for the telecast was smooth as silk, and in particular I’ve never heard the main arrays sound better.”
The Survivor system also included left and right dV-DOSC main arrays, two arrays of Meyer M1Ds for down-fill, a row of d&b C-6s for delay fill, and 72 Apogee SSMs and 64 SAT-3s for front-fill and under-seat fill. Two Yamaha M7-CLs were used for house, while a PM1D and a PM4000 handled monitor duties.
