The Palais en Jazz event at King Louis XV’s Imperial Palace Compiègne in northern France featured Amadeus P.A. speakers and stage monitors.
Photo: Joëlle Rasoarivelo
On June 28 and 29, Palais de Compiègne, a royal palace in northern France built in the 18th century for Louis XV and later the residence of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, provided the setting for the third annual outdoor event Palais en Jazz. This year’s festival included composer/pianist Michel Legrand’s trio, among others. Sound reinforcement included Amadeus’ PMX, DIVA and MAESTRO speaker systems; an SSL Live L500 console; and Sonic Emotion’s Wave I 3D Sound Processor. The three companies were among the event’s co-sponsors.
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Front-of-house engineer Emmanuel Feyrabend mixed his first Palais en Jazz event this summer. “When I arrived on-site, I was introduced to the WFS [Sonic Emotion’s Wave Field Synthesis] process by Arnault Damien from [French distributor] Euphonia. He had been charged by the festival to implement this arrangement in connection with the standard Amadeus-built system designed by Michel Deluc. There was little time to do the Michel Legrand Trio soundcheck. It was pouring rain, and the ‘horizontal’ system was shielded from the rain. Given the time constraints, I opted for safety and focused on the vertical DIVA XL system.
“After the soundcheck, with engineers Arnault Damien and Lucas Hourdin from Juke Box Limited, we decided to feed the WFS system with post-fader stems from all instruments and voices,” Feyrabend continues. “Arnault was able to deliver to each and every listener an identical spatial imaging of the show. The FOH system simply disappeared in terms of where the sound sources originated.”
