New York, NY (May 13, 2019)—New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art currently is hosting its Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll exhibit, bringing together beautiful, and often important, instruments of the rock and roll era. To kick off the exhibit, which runs through October 1, 2019, the Museum held a bash in its massive front lobby—The Great Hall—on April 1, with Manhattan-based Frost Productions fielding a Martin Audio Martin Audio MLA Mini and CDD-LIVE to present late-night mainstays The Roots with guests like Steve Miller and Don Felder of the Eagles.
Frost’s Joe Lima explains, “The Metropolitan’s Great Hall is about 106 ft. long by 70 ft. wide and 65 ft. tall with a surrounding balcony, multiple entrances and exits, and stone and marble all around—a very tough room.”
In addition to dampening hard surfaces with soft goods like thick curtains to cover the stone walls and unused entrances and exits, the audio team positioned the stage in a corner facing towards the center of the room to help avoid direct reflections coming right back at it.
According to Lima, “the third step was choosing a PA that enabled us to ‘Hard Avoid’ whatever was in front or behind it, and direct and focus the energy onto the crowd, which is what really matters—so Martin Audio MLA and cellular technology was the obvious choice. We didn’t need anything that big because we wanted to keep the output contained to the first 60 feet in the room where the bulk of the crowd was going to be. The MLA Mini was a perfect solution for that application without exceeding the museum’s 95 dB SPL limitation.”
The stage was adorned with four MLA Mini cabinets and one MSX sub on top of a WS218X sub per side. In addition, they deployed four CDD-LIVE 8’s for front fills and eight more around the room to fill areas not covered by the PA and maintain consistent coverage throughout the space.”
Discussing the show, Lima added, “The museum originally predicted 400 guests, which turned out to be 1,200 but it was no surprise that the MLA solution was more than adequate. In fact, the additional people helped dampen the sound even more.”
Martin Audio • www.martin-audio.com
