The Big Easy Concert House on Sprague Avenue has established itself in the Pacific Northwest as a place that draws top-name talent. To bring a smooth, intelligible response and high-level SPL capabilities to the venue, they use an ISIS WideLine loudspeaker array from QSC.
J. Bradley of the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Theatre Associates brought in the WideLine array just in time for the club’s grand opening earlier in 2004. Flown above the stage in an eight-per-side configuration and buttressed below by a half-a-dozen ground-dwelling subwoofers, the rig has power via its 140° wide-angle dispersion. The rig is so small in size that most of the 1,500 crowd members on a capacity night aren’t aware of it.
Big Easy general manager Greg Marchant heard the first WideLine rig last year on the Bob Dylan tour, and was immediately hooked. Marchant, who has 22 years of production experience under his belt, says “If anything, first hearing the WideLine outdoors with Dylan made me more critical, and maybe a little skeptical,” he confesses. “With factors working against it such as wind and a number of other troublesome and uncontrollable variances coming in from the outside world, it performed with amazing strength. I was impressed with its clarity and the transparency of its sound, and it was fairly flat from top-to-bottom on the frequency scale. Right away it moved onto our shortlist of contenders for the Big Easy’s sound, and didn’t take long thereafter before it was chosen hands-down for the task. Once installed in the club, it gave us everything we needed in terms of performance, and occupied such little airspace that there virtually isn’t a seat in the house that doesn’t have a direct sightline to the stage.”
A true multipurpose room that hosts some 150-odd concert acts per year, plus two dance nights each week featuring top DJs, the Big Easy has drawn recent live acts such as Jewel, The Wallflowers, John Hiatt, The Temptations and one of only two Pixies club dates booked nationally.
“On our live stage, it’s like Nickel Creek to 2 Live Crew around here, and anything else in between,” Marchant quips. “One of our front-end goals was to put together a sound system that would be accepted by all of our clients. In the past I would have said that would be fairly impossible to do with any one rig, but happily QSC’s WideLine has proved me wrong.”
For more information on QSC Audio products, please go to their Website at www.qscaudio.com.
