Beauty and the Beast tour UK
13/10/2005

The stage production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is in the midst of its second major UK tour, with MC2 amplifiers at the heart of the PA to help ensure that beautiful - not beastly - is how the show sounds.

“This is a complicated, challenging production from the audio perspective,” says sound designer Glen Beckley. “Because it was a film first it has a very intricate score, which is tricky to reproduce live. So rather than make the sound ‘invisible’, I want to reproduce the sense of scale of a cinematic soundtrack in theatres, to make listening to the show an exciting experience. To do that you need very high quality equipment.”

With a touring production, lightness and compactness of equipment are obvious priorities. However, Glen was not prepared to compromise on quality to achieve that, so he specified four MC2 E45 and ten E25 amplifiers to drive the tour’s Funktion One PA system.

“The emphasis for most lightweight amplifiers is on the lightness, usually at the expense of audio quality,” he continues. “When MC2 introduced the E series, I thought it was the first lightweight amp that didn’t have that compromise. And they are still the only lightweight amplifiers that I believe have musicality and smoothness engineered into them.”

The show’s music is provided by 10 musicians and a 24 track pre-recorded backing. This arrangement produces the layered, exciting soundtrack that Glen wants and gives, as he says: “Real weight to the music. It’s all about engineering scale into it.”

Before getting involved in live sound, Glen worked in audio recording, learning his craft from many experienced recording engineers. “There I learned’ he says, ‘that sitting down and listening to what an instrument played acoustically really sounds like, knowing and appreciating what its sound is before the microphone, is the most important thing. That’s what you’re trying to capture. Amplifiers are a very overlooked part of the system. You want to get out something that’s just as good - if not better - than what’s going in.’

“The E Series has so much musicality in the low end, they have the bandwidth to reproduce music properly and also very clever power management,” he continues. “They sound like big, heavy amplifiers, yet the crew are also really happy to work with them.”

Glen’s approach to quality throughout the audio system means that there is no EQ on the acoustic instruments and compression on only one track. “There’s no need,” he says. “We have separation between the musicians and the system components are high quality throughout.”

And, of course, the MC2 amplifiers are the beating heart of it all. “MC2 is one of few amplifier manufacturers that has musicality as their priority,” Glen says. “They care about what they do as much as I do and are thoroughly nice people as well. For me the E series is the only choice of lightweight amplifier out there.”

Beauty and the Beast visits Woking, Sunderland, Oxford, Manchester, Edinburgh, Tunbridge Wells, Hull and Cambridge between now and 7th January next year.

 

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