‘PALAIS EN JAZZ’ FESTIVAL CREATE ‘3D’ SOUND FOR AUDIENCE

Amadeus (based in France) has collaborated with Solid State Logic consoles and Sonic Emotion, (using their ‘3D sound’ Wave 1 processor), on the outdoor event, Palais en Jazz located at the Imperial Palace Compiegne, a royal residence built for Louis XV and restored by Napoleon located in northern France.

The Imperial Palace Compiègne hosts the Palais en Jazz festival every year, on the last weekend of June, this year’s event being the third in the life of the festival. The Imperial Palace Compiegne is one of the finest specimens of France’s architectural heritage and the former residence of the kings of France, and emperors Napoleon and Napoleon III.

Initiated in 2012 by Emmanuel Starcky, director of the national museums and the estates of the Compiègne and Blérancourt castles, along with and producers Hugo Brugiere and Gaetan BYK, from Rocksquare, Palais en Jazz was born of a common ambition to blend times and cultures and eliminate the boundaries between them.

“Our goal was to create a popular event that would bring alive modern music in a historical setting ordinarily very removed from the genre,” says Starcky. This year Palais en Jazz presented performances from internationally renowned jazz artists, Kelvin Jones, French singer and musician Thomas Dutronic, and Michel Legrand, a pianist, singer, author, producer and famed composer of hundreds of film scores, songs, operas and cult jazz albums.

“The success of Palais en Jazz rests, among other things, on the quality of the team of partners behind it and the support they provide. In addition to the festival’s established associates, public and private, several equipment manufacturers stepped in and acquired prominent roles in the event’s production,” explains Hugo Brugiere, co-producer of the festival.

Adding that, “the quality of the solutions and technologies implemented by Amadeus, Solid State Logic and Sonic Emotion, some of which were specially developed for the occasion, makes this great human, entrepreneurial and artistic adventure also a technological one!” .

The event’s producers made use of Amadeus’ PMX, DIVA and MAESTRO speaker systems, to deliver a Hi-Fi sound to the outdoor audience.

Philippe Guerinet, Director of International Sales for SSL and CEO of SSL France, said about the event, “True to the high quality standard of the ‘Palais en Jazz’ event, the synergy between high-end digital equipment worked to the fullest extent possible, whether it was the digital SSL Live L500 , Sonic Emotion’s Wave 1 processor or Amadeus’s DIVA sound reinforcement system. The whole system was easily and quickly set up by the technical staff, in spite of very challenging weather conditions.”

He went on to say, “We knew that a exceptional technical event was to come, on top of an exceptional musical event. The performances by the musicians on stage allowed us to appreciate the musical excellence of the digital chain set up for the occasion, in view of the exacting operating conditions imposed by the weather.” 

The SSL Live L500 recently had its festival circuit debut by The Killers and toured on Peter Gabriel’s Back to Front: So Anniversary tour (you can read our article about those tours here).

“The ‘Sonic Wave I 3D’ sound processor maximizes the listening experience of a live show by creating spatial sound reinforcement to entertain the entire audience, no matter where they are positioned,” explains Etienne Corteel, Chief Science Officer at Sonic Emotion Labs.

Corteel added. “Based on sound field control with its foundation of wave field synthesis, the 3D sound created from Sonic Emotion’s technology allows the professional venue and sound designer the ability to create a natural 3D sound field using a limited number of loudspeakers, or as many as 64, to provide listeners with an experience of a ‘sweet spot’ that expands across the entire room, no matter where listeners are positioned.”

Describing his initial experience at the Palais en Jazz event, FOH engineer Emmanuel Feyrabend (who has mixed Brad Scott, Veronique Sanson, Claude Nougaro, Mylene Farmer, Johnny Hallyday, Florent Pagny… and many others) recalls, “When I arrived on site, I was introduced to the WFS process by Arnault Damien from Euphonia. He had been charged by the festival to implement this arrangement, in connection with the standard Amadeus-built system, designed by Michel Deluc. There was little time to do the Michel Legrand Trio sound-check. It was pouring rain, and the ‘horizontal’ system was shielded from the rain. Given the time constraints, I opted for safety and focused on the vertical DIVA XL system.”

Adding that, “After the sound check, with engineers Arnault Damien and Lucas Hourdin from Juke Box Limited, we decided to feed the WFS system with post-fader stems from all instruments and voices. Arnault was able to deliver to each and every listener an identical spatial imaging of the show! It was just staggering. The FOH system simply disappeared in terms of where the sound sources originated.”

So enthralled with the system arrangement, Feyrabend said, “My only desire would be to work with the same arrangement again, as soon as possible. It’s an experience that’s halfway between the power of a sound reinforcement system and the subtlety of the best Hi-Fi loudspeakers. Strange, and incredibly good at the same time.”

Excerpts from Press Release