New York’s danse macabre with d&b.
“The Pier of Fear is just amazing,” states Kevin Mignone from KM Productions, on what is already hailed New York’s best EDM event of Halloween 2014. “Staged by RPM Worldwide Inc., it is becoming one of the city’s great annual festivals. The revelers go to incredible lengths to look the part; frankly most of them scare me more than bumping into Freddie Krueger on a dark night. So if they’re going to go to so much trouble, the least we can do is honor that and work just as hard to give them the greatest sound they’ve ever heard.
As audio provider for the last three years we are always looking to make things even better. For EDM that means systems made by d&b audiotechnik; it’s practically the default choice for DJs and we supplied a lot of d&b J and V-Series for this year’s event. The quest for the best, while not quite as weird looking as the partygoers, did see us come up with a totally new audio approach to putting the big beats down on the dance floor.”
The venue on Pier 94 is not the friendliest when it comes to sound reinforcement. “It’s an old warehouse; sheet rock walls and steel roof: the acoustic is a nightmare,” was Mignone’s appraisal. “Put simply, I realized that if we switched from a performance style, end on sound system, to treating the room more as a club with distributed sound, we could concentrate sound energy where it is needed most, on the dancers.
In d&b’s prediction software ArrayCalc, I had mapped the room as per the architect’s drawings. My idea was to place four sets of four V-Series arrays on each side, pointing inwards onto the dance area; eight arrays in all, with a pair of J-SUBs beneath each hang also pointing inwards. We know the constant directivity of d&b systems is bankable data and the J-SUBs are cardioid, so the calculations showed the system would fire enough energy into the audience for them to feel the power and emotion of the DJs, while minimizing the impact elsewhere. Of course I had checked my calculations before the event but we still tested with pink noise ahead of the party and realized we would have precisely the sort of headroom the DJs craved.”
Jarrod Khoury from RPM managed the event and was delighted with the result. “Kevin and the guys at KM have done a lot of work and we had a very successful event. The DJs were ecstatic and our audience had the night of their lives. We are looking forward to working with them again in the future.”
