Bocelli Storms NYC's Central Park With L-ACOUSTICS K1

Huge crowd flocks to Great Lawn for free concert by Italian superstar tenor

NEW YORK CITY -- Despite chilly temperatures and drizzling rain, nothing could dampen the spirits of the 60,000 opera and pop fans that descended upon Central Park's Great Lawn on September 15th to see and hear Andrea Bocelli's highly-publicized free concert. Accompanied by the New York Philharmonic and Westminster Symphonic Choir, Bocelli performed some of his most beloved pieces while sharing the stage with an impressive list of special guests, including Ana Maria Martinez, Pretty Yende, Celine Dion, Tony Bennett, Chris Botti, David Foster, Bryn Terfel, Nicola Benedetti and Andrea Griminelli.

Sponsored by Italian pasta maker Barilla, the nearly three-hour concert was recorded by Thirteen/WNET for a national PBS broadcast of Great Performances airing on December 2nd. A CD and DVD appropriately titled Andrea Bocelli Live in Central Park will also be made available prior to the holidays, released on Sugar/Decca.

Firehouse Productions of Red Hook provided the evening's concert sound reinforcement system, which most notably featured left and right arrays of a dozen L-ACOUSTICS K1 paired with three KARA for downfill. Clusters of three ARCS were furthermore hung on the far sides of each K1 array to cover the front corners of the audience.

Sixteen SB28 subs positioned under the front riser supporting the camera dolly delivered the low end, with an additional four SB28 per side set up in cardioid mode to complement the ARCS outfills and enlarge the LF arc delay coverage. The K1, KARA and SB28 systems were collectively powered by a total of 22 LA8 amplified controllers, all housed in LA-RAK touring racks.

"As expected, K1 performed extremely well," notes Sound Designer and FOH Engineer Andrea Taglia, who has worked with Bocelli for the past five years. "The system is absolutely uniform on the horizontal axis, its long throw capacity is amazing, and it was very effective in bringing a nice sound image back to the stage -- even though our six delay towers were positioned so widely across the Great Lawn at the request of the video director. Although there were 60,000 people in the audience that evening, considering that Bocelli's last CD sold five million copies, the true focus of this concert was on capturing a pristine live recording."

"The line producer congratulated us during the sound check/dress rehearsal, and then again after the concert," he adds. "Event Resources' production manager also congratulated us after the show and commented on how the live sound was perfect, even at the end of the lawn. And the team at the Sugar label, who conceived and organized the event with Bocelli, were absolutely overjoyed because, again, their primary objective was to achieve a great recording, which they did."

Taglia points out that part of this success can certainly be attributed to L-ACOUSTICS' acoustical modeling software, SOUNDVISION. "I always set up my systems with SOUNDVISION; I find it very accurate and trustable. With it, I was able to cleanly keep the sound off the stage, greatly minimizing any spill into the microphones, and everyone was very happy with the results."

For additional details on Bocelli's Central Park concert, visit www.bocellicentralpark.com.

Firehouse Productions can be found on the Web at www.firehouseproductions.com.

L-ACOUSTICS is a leading innovator and manufacturer of high-performance loudspeakers, amplifiers and signal processing devices for touring and installed sound markets. Known around the globe for pioneering and championing the modern line array loudspeaker concept with V-DOSC, the company has received numerous accolades for its K1, KUDO, KARA, KIVA, ARCS, XT coaxial loudspeaker systems and SB line of subwoofer enclosures, all powered and processed with the LA4 and LA8 amplified controllers in fulfillment of a "total system approach." L-ACOUSTICS products for the US market are distributed by L-ACOUSTICS US of Oxnard, California.

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