With more than 100 million albums sold during his long and illustrious career, James Last and his Orchestra have a huge fan base in Europe. His recent visit to London (where these photographs were taken) saw him sell out London’s Royal Albert Hall….TWICE!
German rental company Sound Linear has deployed its system on the One More Time tour, which encompassed 23 shows in 6 countries. From the Albert Hall through to the 02 World in Berlin, the tour perfectly demonstrated the flexibility and scalability of STM.
“On the one hand, we needed a small system which wouldn’t intrude visually on the production design,” says Sound Linear’s Kalle Hogrefe. “However, on the other hand, the tour demanded an arena-sized system because of the distances involved in the larger venues. By using the M46 main cabinets and flying some S118 subs on top, we were able to fulfill both criteria perfectly. Any other system which could do that would have had a much larger footprint.”
The tour also proved STM’s compatibility with other NEXO models, with GEO S12s used as sidefill and outfill, and PS10s for nearfill. “They sound really good together,” continues Hogrefe, a NEXO user since Sound Linear first purchased an Alpha system in 1993.
James Last’s front-of-house engineer Paddi Addison was experiencing STM for the first time. “I really enjoyed it and preferred it to the system we’ve used on the past few tours,” he says. “It performed well in all the different types and sizes of venue on the tour. There was a high degree of consistency between venues, which made it very easy to mix on. And using it in combination with NEXO GEO S12s as outfills worked well for the wider venues.”
Addison found the system suited the style of music he was mixing. “James Last is a mixture of easy listening, classical and pop, and the STM system worked very well for this,” he says. “James Last audiences demand high fidelity at low volume levels and it can be hard to get a tight, punchy sound under those constraints, especially at the low end of the frequency spectrum. I especially enjoyed the S118 sub modules for this reason. This was the best low end sound the James Last Orchestra has ever had, without a doubt.”
The system’s wide dispersion was also a major plus point for Addison. “This meant that, wherever one sat in the auditorium, the sound appeared to be coming from the band on stage, rather than from the PA system somewhere above one’s head,” he says. “I think this feature alone is a vast improvement in musicality over most line array systems. I’ll certainly be requesting the STM for any future James Last tours!”
A final word of confirmation from Kalle Hogrefe, “As we increase our experience of using the system for different concerts and tours, we are happy to confirm that it sounds very good with all musical genres, whether loud or quiet, classical, rock or pop.”
