London, UK (January 10, 2018)—The Killers, currently playing New York City this week, recently closed out the UK leg of their world tour with two nights at London’s O2 Arena. Along for the UK journey was longtime audio provider Capital Sound, which fielded its Martin Audio MLA PA. The tour behind the band’s Wonderful Wonderful album finds FOH engineer Kenny Kaiser mixing the show, with system tech Toby Donovan on hand to keep an eye on the system.
The MLA set-up included main hangs of 17 MLA elements and two MLD Downfills per side, with side hangs consisting of a dozen MLA and a MLD Downfill per side. Supplementing them were secondary side hangs of 10 MLA Compact enclosures on each side.
Giving the low-end some firepower, 21 MLX resided across the front of the stage, grouped into seven three-high ground stacks, with the bottom enclosure reversed. Bolstering that were five MLX subwoofers flown on each side at a 45° angle between the main and side hangs to ensure low-end reinforcement round the sides. To complete the coverage, six of Capital Sound’s favored Martin Audio DD12’s were used as front fills.
“On this tour, said FOH man Kaiser, “my main focus is clarity and I mix tonality second. When we’ve had some challenges, like at Glasgow Hydro or at Brixton Academy, using ‘Hard avoid’ [in DISPLAY software] just cleaned everything up.”
Donovan noted, “We’re using the latest version of the DISPLAY software to generate the presets which somewhat dictates the coverage the PA achieves through the venue—as well as other factors like SPL profile or if you want to achieve any particular avoidance areas of balcony front, or make the stage a bit quieter. We’re just allocating most of the DSP in order to achieve a decent smooth SPL profile through the venue.”
Meanwhile, Kaiser remained pleased with the power of the system as well: “This box really throws—it’s insane. You can do any arena, you just put the system up and go. I’ve been sitting at like 108 dB—I had a peak at 112 dB last night [at O2 Arena] so there’s tons of power in this thing and I’m barely tickling the green meters. Over in Dublin, the producer of the actual album [Jacknife Lee] came out and said it was one of the better shows he heard in there; he actually walked the room and it was great coverage everywhere.”
Martin Audio • www.martin-audio.com
