TPi AWARDS 2013

Yet another successful edition of the TPi Awards saw the achievements of the Live Sector’s greatest talents and standout companies recognised. The TPi Team spoke to the crew working hard behind the scenes to make the awards ceremony one of the most highly rated in the industry calendar.

This year’s much anticipated TPI Awards saw over 1.000 people gather at Novotel London West to celebrate the achievements of some of the live event industry’s most gifted individuals. Since its launch in 2002, the event’s reputation as one of the finest networking events for those in the live sector has grown year on year. BBC 6Music’s Lauren Laverne did a sterling job at hosting the ceremony, which comprised 27 categories that were open to both national and international companies. In a change to 2013’s Event, the Live Production of the Year award was a live vote for all the attendees on the night.

The 2013 event is the first time that Cheshire based VME has supplied the TPi Awards’ audio needs. The two main requirements for the system were coverage and clarity, with particular emphasis being made to ensure the back part of the room was loud enough for all of the guests to hear. VME’s Project Manager, Ben Hyman, said: “Ensuring that every person, no matter where they were sat, could hear the audio at the right level was priority. … For the back part of the room, Kling & Freitag CA106’s and CA 1001’s speaker cabinets were used, underpinned with Kling & Freitag SW112 subs. Both models were chosen for their combination of coverage, power and sonic clarity. A Yamaha CLS console was used at FOH to run the show, with audio distributed over AES via two Yamaha Rio3224-D Dante stageboxes, one behind the main stage to feed the MLA Compact, and the other at the back of the room to feed the amplifiers for the Kling & Freitag cabinets. … Hyman continued: “We had to think up a variety of out-of-the-box methods to rig the speakers safely where we wanted them. We couldn’t let the room dictate where cabinets needed to go, as we wouldn’t be able to achieve the coverage necessary, so we had to come up with our own options. The biggest challenge was the time alignment of the system though. We used Smaart to assist in doing this. With such a number of individual speakers, a large proportion of effort was in the time alignment of the system to ensure that vocal presence came from the stage and would draw the attention of people to the stage itself. When the presenter moved from the main stage to the smaller B stage, all the delays adjusted to move the focus of the audio to the B stage. “The Awards were excellent this year, Lauren Laverne did a great job presenting and it was great to have so many people come up to FOH after the event and comment that the sound this year was a big improvement!” …

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