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by Phil Ward
UK - There once was a time when a performer stood with an acoustic guitar, open mic'd and listening to himself on wedges. The engineer had to ride the faders as each song ebbed and flowed, and the artist picked songs at random from an ad hoc set list dictated more by the audience than a computer. People loved it.
This time was called October 1998; the performer was former Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, and the engineer was Chris 'Privet' Hedge, a past master of rock and roll touring taking, with some relief, a busman's holiday from the battery of technological assistance now available to the live act.
Not that he's a luddite. As FOH engineer for Genesis, Hedge has employed all of the state-of-the-art sound design techniques money can buy - and one or two it couldn't, no doubt. It's just that, when the occasion demands, it's sometimes a good idea to keep things simple and trust in the basic requirements of sound reinforcement. Like bloody good loudspeakers, for example...
"A Meyer Sound box is a very natural sounding box," Hedge opines, backstage at London's prestigious Festival Hall, where his Meyer-based system supplied by rental company Canegreen has just been acoustically dovetailed into the venue. "And because it's trapezoidal the coverage is great. The high and the mid information is the most important thing when you're doing theatres with this kind of music. Our Albert Hall show really demonstrated this. Everywhere you went - except up in 'the lap of...