Ohio’s Columbus Symphony Orchestra celebrated America’s birthday in grand style with a concert featuring the Harmony Project Choir for an evening of patriotic favorites and Sousa marches topped off with a brilliant fireworks display over 4th of July weekend.
For this year’s concert, the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) called on Ohio-based Above Sound to provide sound reinforcement for the concert held in the open-air Columbus Commons Bicentennial Stage.
While the venue does have an existing system, CAPA is considering a facility rehabilitation and system upgrade, and due to the fact that the Symphony was joined by a 500-voice Harmony Project Choir, additional staging needed to be added for the event mandating a system repositioning for the concert. With those two agenda items, Above Sound brought in their large format RCF HDL50 system.
Due to the size of the choir, who were positioned in front of the orchestra, the system arrays were positioned much wide apart then would be normally necessary. With the park surrounded by office buildings, it was necessary to control sound and keep it within the parameters of the park. Plus there needed to be finite control of low frequencies, both on stage and controlled off the office building facades.
The system consisted of left and right line arrays each with 12 RCF HDL50-A (three-way active line array) and six SUB9007-AS (dual 21” active subwoofers) in cardioid configuration.
Above Sound’s Barry Damron worked with RCF’s production engineer Oscar Mora to achieve the needs of the orchestra and production team.
“The symphony conductor was concerned over low energy from the system emitted back onto the stage,” notes Mora. “That required us to set up two cardioid configurations of SUB9007-AS on either side of stage to reduce the rear energy lobing of the system.”
“We’ve had the RCF system out dozens of times, and knew it would be the right solution for this event,” says Damron. “And knowing RCF stands behind their product and even provided additional engineering support for this concert, we feel confident in the product, and the RCF support team.”
Damron started the Hilliard, Ohio-based Above Sound in 2007. After a stint as an engineer at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Damron returned to Ohio and saw a need for a production company in the market. In recent years, he’s expanded his pro audio inventory with the addition of RCF HDL20-A, TTL33-A and HDL50-A line array systems; and has recently added lighting and staging to his inventory.
