There were some instability points at the Garden after the show started because, to obtain the levels he was looking for, the mixer was operating the system very close to feedback. I had earlier used JBL Smaart-Pro to find the most problematic frequencies, and during the show I used that knowledge and current measurements to restabilize the system. Thorny does not suggest that it was a cake walk. The Garden is a tough room. Based on my one previous experience there with Pavarotti about ten years ago, I knew there were few situations to look out for.
Round rooms do some predictable things in terms of focusing audio energy.
In the recent renovation of the Garden, they added VIP boxes, which broke up a lot of the cylindrical walls near the ceiling. These new VIP boxes fortunately don't have plate glass windows to serve as additional reflectors. Still, there are some parts of the wall left exposed with our system, for lack of a better word, was going to blast right into, reflecting sound energy back into the room. To mitigate the reverberation from those upper-level walls, Thorny ordered about 300 feet of black velour drapes. The wall space is a retro-reflector, so I was doubly concerned.