The sound system of the show is consist of multiple point sources which are over stage and surround the audience. Though the show takes place in a black box theatre, the audience seating is not as the traditional seating which is surround the L shape stage, central audience is surrounded by the stage and four seats are even on the stage. The mixing position is right next to the far end of the stage.

So here are three challenges of my work -

The main challenge of this show is the speakers layout and the coverage. Since the audience and the stage is in irregular and asymmetrical shape, what I did was divided audience into multiple sections so that it is easier to do different angel tuning to make a better coverage with the point source pairs. As the speaker plot - ground plan shown below, two nearly identical point source loudspeakers were used as PA to cover each rectangle shaped audience section (originally I chose QSC KW122 for the main speaker sets, but ended up with using JBL EON as the main).

Second challenge is, for the central audience which was surrounded by the stage, I realized that it was impossible to hang the speakers over the stage, due to all the pipes, lights are jammed up there and left sound no space, yes it wouldn’t fit, so I decided to lay the speakers on the floor, under the stage and cover them with permeable materials. It turned out to be good and very even for those 14 seats.

Also, due to the very short distance between the sound source with the loudspeaker (the actors sing right under the speakers sometimes), the gain before feedback is quite tricky to adjust. So, NO VOCAL SIGNAL in the foldback speakers over stage. A huge thank to Lao Sun and Yizhi, the music director and composer who rooted for me about no vocal signal in the foldbacks.