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From the drapery and colourful area rugs on the stage to his heartfelt greetings to family and friends in a jubilant Massey Hall in Toronto, it was obvious that the highway had finally brought Tom Cochrane back home. What made the show a treat for so many in the audience wasn't just a great performance in an intimate setting, but that the sound reinforcement was expertly tailored to the unique characteristics of the material performed under the constraints imposed by that particular venue.
"That's the loudest Toronto audience I've ever heard," Cochrane told me enthusiastically the morning after the show. "It was right up there with the Mad Mad World tour - I think even louder!" In fact, the adulation of the frenzied near-capacity crowd peaked at around 105dB^sub SPL^ (A-weighted), about twice the sound power of the loudest parts of the show - up to the encores?, that is, when FOH mixer Ettore Dedivitiis decided to get even and pushed the master fader ever so briefly to kiss the audience goodnight, with a nudge at about 108dB^sub SPL^. Up to that point, he had worked a wide dynamic range, dipping as low as 82dB^sub SPL^ during the "acoustic" set and cresting no louder than 102dB^sub SPL^, a comfortable level which allowed the audience to go home without that cursed ringing in the ears caused by the unnecessarily loud sound pressure levels that prevail in too many concerts.
Cochrane and Dedivitiis spoke with me at length about this, because it's an issue not only of audience relations in the personal sense, but also of matching and adjusting the performance sound system intelligently with a specific hall, something they had to do differently for every date of Cochrane's No Stranger cross-Canada tour in support of the recent eponymous CD release. I suggested that the practice of some acts to turn up the volume to make the show sound better is really no different from turning the lights down to make your date more attractive - in the end, who do you think you're fooling?
"A lot of the rooms we've been playing are deader than Massey. I forgot how live Massey Hall is," Cochrane said. "Winspear Centre in Edmonton and Jack Singer Concert Hall in...