‘The Dome’ is a German television program and music event, produced and broadcast by RTL 2. Roughly every three months, a new show is recorded in an event hall in a different city in Germany or Austria, in front of a crowd of 5,000 to 15,000 people. This edition was broadcast from the Colosseum Theater in Essen, the live stage featuring a large number of international artists, including Amy MacDonald, Daniele Negroni, Mandy Capristo, Timomatic, DJane Housekat, Conor Maynard, Los Colorados, Luka Hänni, Oceana, Mark Forster, Chima, and Jedward. As the name suggests, this is the 62nd programme in a series that has been running for 15 years.
Monitor engineer Thomas Hofer and front-of-house engineer Kai Reiss chose NEXO 45°N-12 line monitors for the stage, the first time these loudspeakers have been used by a PRG sound crew. Both are highly experienced engineers; “I’ve done production almost continuously on ‘The Dome’ since episode 22,” says Reiss. “We never had the chance to build such an even monitor sound field in the front, until now, with the new principles offered by the N-12s.”
His comments are endorsed by monitor engineer Thomas Hofer. “Everything has already been said about the excellent acoustical behaviour of this wedge. To work with them provided pure confirmation of all the good things I’d heard. Really astonishing. Now I simply call them ‘my new friends’!”
Reinhard Steger from audiovation, NEXO’s distributor in Germany, says “it’s always a pleasure to watch serious engineers meet the 45°N-12s, but the wedges attracted attention even from the other departments – the lighting designer on The Dome production was commenting on the low profile and small footprint of the N-12, compared to other traditional monitors.”
Exploiting the benefits of line-array technology to create the best possible stage monitor, the 45°N-12 draws on NEXO’s patented Hyperbolic Reflective Wavesource which works by creating virtual acoustic sources behind the enclosure itself and below the stage, using reflection rather than coercion to determine the shape of the wavefront. Unlike a conventional high frequency waveguide in which the exit is rectangular, the NEXO monitor’s waveguide forms a ‘smile’, enabling cabinets to be linked together to form arrays without interference between wavefronts. The N-12 design produces a very sharply defined dispersion pattern at the same time as offering a huge improvement in terms of level before feedback. The focused coverage results in lower acoustic power on stage. SPL and frequency response are consistent up to 2.5 metres back.
