A Barking Dog

A few weeks ago I had the chance to kick the tires on a Neo Geo T system. The Reader’s Digest version is that it’s an outstanding sounding system in a small package utilizing the latest in technology. The downside is the rigging and array predictor are a bit complicated, compared to other solutions and the transport package still needs some refinement for touring use. All in all I was very pleased with the system.

We hung an array of six Geo T 4805s and a Geo T 2815 from a forktruck. They were powered by Camco Vortex 6s and controller by the Nexo NX242 controller. The thing that strikes you right out the gate is the look of the box. It’s kind of Batman meets Starwars meets the Matrix. It definately has a unique appearance. The boxes are small and light and pretty easy to handle. The rigging appears to be pretty complicated and took me most of the rest of the morning to get my head around it. It’s a combination of cams and holes drilled in side plates and not intuitive at all on first glance. Unless the local crews have worked with it before, they’ll be hard pressed to get it down in short time so delegating the pinning to more advanced local crew is probably not advisable at this point. Transportation, while compact is problematic at this point for daily touring use. The demo rig came in case over boxes, three modules per case with the under hangs, (2815s) having to be manually taken off the array and loaded into the case. For locals and one offs it’s probably not so much an issue but for daily touring it’s going to be a chore and I’m told that the larger providers and making racks or carts to accomodate more boxes. Something like two groups of six on a set cart style rack would make a pretty slick little package though there might have to be two versions, one for US truck sized and one for Euro truck sizes.

Once you get your head around the system of the rigging it does go up pretty quick. The bumper and associated piece known as the kelping beam are robust and pretty heavy. There are two modes of hanging the system, compression mode and tension mode. Compression mode uses one set of holes in the grid and requires use of the kelping beam as a pullup which is basically what I call a “tight pack” of the array. Tension mode uses another set of holes on the side grid and allows for the array to shape by the natural gravity of the hang, or what I call “loose pack” of the array. Tension mode is limited to 12 modules but that’s a pretty fair sized rig. We hung the rig in tension mode and couldn’t quite get the amount of height required for the size of the array. In many if not most of the proscienium theaters in the US tension mode will have to be used due to the footprint of the rigging. Compression mode should have no problem in sheds and arenas. The difference in the two modes from a rigging standpoint is the front to back distance of the two hoists.

Well, how did it sound? Good. Really good. As good as or better than anything out there very punchy for such a compact size. I railed the shit out of it and as it went into clip then protect it handled it gracefully, though the local rep was a bit squeemish at that point. (I’ve known him since I moved up here in 1990). The ol’ Camco’s blinked pretty hard and as the rig was due at a gig in Portland in a couple of days and I’d bet that they didn’t want to tell the mothership “Well, we let Stevens drive it and we need a bunch of drivers”. I had the array just south of 120A at about 50 feet, plenty loud but not as painful as a traditional array or waveguide or horn at that SPL and distance.

The technology behind the box is not a traditional Olsen based line array, though the box produces output in a curve linear fashion. They call it a “Tangent Array”. The coherency of the output is based on a few different things, the design and configuration of the array, the makeup of the waveguides and phase plugs and pattern control using DSP and rear firing mid range woofers giving the array as a whole a cardiod polar pattern. The CD12 sub in particular had good rejection characteristics at the rear to the point where we could carry on a conversation at a normal level while the stack of two CD12s was playing at concert level. One thing I see as a major downside of the CD12 sub is there has to be about four feet of lateral clearance between stacks and you can’t back them to a hard surface. I think that limits the applications for many folks for that cardiod sub. Hnaging them in vertical arrays, either with the Geo Ts or on their own seems like the perferred method of deployment for the CD12. I don’t see the CD12, or the Geo T for that matter, being used in situations where the system isn’t able to hang.

All in all, it’s one of the better sounding systems I’ve heard though there are some deployment concerns that need to be addressed. I look forward to using it sometime on a real gig.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2005 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Barking Dog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.