Festival wise, we have the niche Lively Bird Festival in Burton Joyce near Nottingham on the 26th, with an nice line up headlined by toploader (pictured left) and a bit of something for everybody this is sure to be a lovely one day event. We’ll be supplying an A&H iLive for each end of the multicore, along with 8 Stacks of Turbosound Floodlight, and a package of BMA wedge monitors.

We’re also doing 4 Fake Festivals, in Tynemouth, Brough, Doncaster and Winterton. A small 4 stack system will be deployed once again with a pair of A&H ML3000 consoles.

Then we have the Ladies of Country tour, we were asked by Phil Ross at Trickolite to supply a speaker system, a line system and a pair of consoles. This had to fit in to strict weight, and budgetary restraints. We’ve settled on 4 Stacks of Turbosound Floodlight with a pair of FLF10′s for centre fill. Desks wise we’ll be providing a pair of Allen and Heath iLive, with an analogue split, and cat5 ACE multicores. This will suppliment a monitor system and other stage systems provided by Trickolite. Chris Crowther will be representing BMA and looking after monitor duties, while trickolite are supplying Chris Wareing to operate FOH sound.

And in the mean time, I’m out looking after Front of House sound for Rumours of Fleetwood Mac on their UK may tour. This long standing gig is one which I really enjoy mixing as a Sound Engineer. But in months like this running a hire company whilst being on tour tests my organisational abilities to the limit!

The picture is taken from the other side of the glass, where the audience will be!

At first glance the benefits of a headphone gig are huge, there are minimal acoustic problems to contend with, however with this new found freedom we have raised the bar for production standards, it’s like mixing an album, but on the fly! Hands and ears will be very busy indeed.

To make the task a little easier we’re supplying an iLive T112 for good ‘hands on’ speed and the ability to store individual songs to their own scenes. We’re also supplying a line system, mics and stands so that the the get ins and outs can be at lighting speed, particularly at the train station where the only convenient loading area is the busy pickup/ dropoff bay!

This is an ideal chance to hear a gig, as you’ve never heard one before.

The performances will both be by Michael Eden performing his album Doors. This album has been lovingly recorded at Paul Blakeman’s beautiful Club 60 studio, with some of Sheffield’s finest musicians backing Eden this is an awesome opportunity to hear live music with it’s every detail exposed.

Production rehearsals are currently taking place at Club 60 and everybody involved is very excited about the project. Fingers crossed!

•  48 Sends – 3 way Passive Split
• 16 way returns system, flexible and highly configurable connectivity options
• Default system length 80 Metres (this is extendible to cater for any length)
• Industry standard VDM150 & VDM54 interconnects. Ideal for subhire to and from other audio hire companies.
• 2 x Cat5e lines in each system.
• Compact 12U main stageboxes.
• 10 x 16 Way Detachable remote boxes with ‘thru’ multipin to facilitate up to 6 remote box drops per system.

The planning process is a long one, how many sends? how many return lines? which multi pin connectors to use, detachable remote boxes or captive remote boxes? These are the basic questions to answer. The final design brief was this;

• Build 2 x complete, identical systems.
• 48 Sends
• 16 Returns
• 80M Standard cable lengths which are easily extendible for huge venues.
• Detachable 16 way remote boxes with multi pin in and out.
• Custom metal work.
•  A neat way to contain captive tails at stage box
• The facility to house a digital mixer ‘brain’ within the stage box itself.

16 x Male & 16 Female XLR
2x Passive  VDM 54 splits for amprack feeds etc..

This is one remote box and a length of VDM54. As you’ve seen above there are only 3 x remote box inputs for VDM54 remote connections, but the addition of a thru multipin allows duplicate boxes to be placed around the stage.

 
This is the start of an extensive cabling overhaul, coming in the future – a standard panel/loom system to interface desks and racks in a ‘universal’ fashion and a revised amplifier rack patch system. Developing these systems is great, but very time consuming and expensive. With another hectic summer season just around the corner I fear the progress over the next few months may be slower than my ambitious mind would like it to be!
 

Leeds Festival – Alternative Stage (System Only). 

Phil McDaniel from ESS approached us about supplying a FOH loudspeaker system for the Alternative Stage. We were of course pleased to help, and sent out 6 stacks of Turbosound Floodlight.  The Alternative Stage line up over the weekend featured some impressive names, one name in particular was noted for his massive draw, and potentially putting the whole tent over capacity was Tim Minchin(pictured left), where an estimated 5000 people tried to cram into the tent, one person was reported to have cut a hole in the side of the tent for a better view!

Whilst this madness was going on I was with The Pigeon Detectives on the main stage handling monitors, our crowd was very very good for the time of day. Definitely a highlight of my summer, and my career thus far.

Healing Village Festival – Music Stage.

This local festival contacted us last year to discuss upping the standard of their production to the next level. We didn’t really know what we were walking into. Damian Low was handling FOH, while I looked after monitors. We went with the approach of  ’rig for bad weather’ both metaphorically and literally. The event was to be on a lorry back stage, in very close proximity to local residents. The weather in Sheffield had been grim, so we were very happy when we got on site to a helpful, and well organised team running the event. They looked after us very well, had booked a few decent local bands and managed to sell 1700+ tickets. Not bad at all. The day ran seamlessly until the headline act took took to the stage, when a couple of electrical gremlins reared their heads. These were solved, and then the generator running the stage stopped generating electricity, and started making clouds of smoke and steam instead.  A backup generator was obtained and the show went on. Coldplace gripped the crowds attention and everybody left, happy and singing.

Fake Festivals

The great summer cocktail. 1000 people, a marquee, a well stocked and sensibly priced bar. The best bit, it’s on your doorstep. These events have taken off in a big way since their launch in 2008. We’ve always supplied a similar system, and this year was no exception.  4 stacks of Turbosound Floodlight, an Allen & Heath ML3000-32 console for FOH and another for monitors, 9 of our FLW15 (15″+2″) wedge monitors, plus a drumfill and a very hard working festival mic package.  There were some funny highlights this year, one of which was a surprise performance by the current cast of ‘Britans Got Talent’.  Here is a picture of Jim looking after monitors at a Fake Festival.

Fieldview Festival 2011

This gig went off, in a huge way. It was without doubt my highlight of 2011, for so many different reasons. Firstly it’s run by a group of the nicest people alive. Dan & James Cameron, Oz Hetherington, Johnny McIlroy, Tom Northeast and so many others. Like minded, caring and just generally up for a good time. This crew work hard and play hard, they do it for the love, not for the money. Their passion is radiant, and rubs off on every single person in attendance. Creating simply the nicest festival atmosphere I’ve ever experienced.

It’s some time since we started this experiment. The aim was to determine if an old standard could beat it’s more modern equivalents.

We’d been using BSS omnidrive compact FDS355 to process our Turbosound Floodlight stacks for some time. But due to a few reliability issues and other influences I decided that it was time to try something new. Bought a pair of  BSS FDS360 crossovers on eBay, and instantly took them to my favourite wizard, Mark Hudson at Hi-Q sound in Lincoln. A few phone calls later I collected the units, re carded to suit Floodlight’s crossover points.

First impressions were good, and an extensive evening of listening and experimenting followed, by the time this was complete and several black coffees later I tidied the warehouse and headed home, confident that the weekends gigs would prove very interesting indeed.

We headed out to do a Fake Festival, a regular BMA show, I was looking after FOH and had done a thousand times before, in exactly the same marquee with exactly the same system. When we first lit up the PA it was like somebody had been into all of the boxes and cleaned off the cobwebs. It just sounded ‘better’. The low end was plump and ‘rolled’ better than it had previously, the next somewhat staggering difference was apparent in the upper mid range, which had a new transparency and a dynamic ‘willingness’ about it which had certainly been missing in the older setups.

Over the coming months most of the regular BMA crew who had experience working on floodlight processed by both Omnidrive compact and the ‘new’ analogue processing had reached the same conclusion. The analogue sounded better.

Since 2010 all floodlight is now run by FDS-360′s and Yamaha T-n series amplifiers.

Having attended many festivals already this summer and hearing large systems from most of the major manufacturers, d&b, JBL, EV, L’acoustics, Nexo etc. I’ve been hearing a lot of sub content. But, for the most part it sounds wrong. ‘Forced’ and ‘Un natural’ are descriptive terms  which spring to mind. Nexo, in my opinion shows a most obviously processed low end. Whilst L’acoustics seems to be the most neutral sounding of the bunch.

Interesting the L’acoustics SB218 is well known as a relatively inefficient cabinet, a simple 2 x 18″. On it’s spec sheet the FR graph suggests that it is just that, a well tuned reflex cabinet. With a -3dB point somewhere in the high 30′s.

The Nexo S2 on the other hand, sounds unreasonably slow, forced and processed, and interestingly the spec sheet for this cabinet doesn’t even provide a FR graph, nevermind an unprocessed response. The S2 is a bandpass design, or as nexo like to call it “a high efficiency resonator design”. Now, to me the word resonance, suggests amplification through standing waves, and the loading of air between the chambers in the cabinet. It also implies a long ringing sound. Nexo state, as many modern manufacturers do that the S2 must be used with their own proprietary controller.  This to me sets alarm bells ringing immediately as to how much processing may be going on under the bonnet.

So, we’re weighing up the options, I guess the first thing to consider is quite how low we need to get, i would consider -3dB at 30Hz as a reasonable if not slightly ambitious target, unprocessed. Much lower than that and we’re getting into seriously large cabinets, and seriously large amplifiers. There are many designs which can accomplish this common modern designs are are listed below.

• Horns – manufacturers such as EM acoustics and EAW are making long, powerful bass horns. By logic and reason a horn will have the fastest transient response, but the major disadvantage is the physical mouth area a 30Hz horn must have. It will however have the greatest efficiency when used in the correct quantities.
• Direct Radiators – A great compromise between size, and LF extension, however pretty inefficient. Consequently we’d need a large number of boxes to match the SPL of the system running above it.
• Bandpass – Loads of output but generally sounds a little ‘false’.

What to do is the next question. Build or buy? Whilst keen to keep a branding on the FOH PA. We are in no way against using our own designs, if they are the most effective way to satisfy the requirements. Whilst in production, cabs manufactured in house will be the cheapest solution, they are not necessarily the cheapest option overall. There are a few criteria to fulfill in either instance. Firtstly, the frontal size must be similar to the turbosound bins that we currently use, to satisfy aesthetic and safe stacking needs, secondly they must be high efficiency if we are to mix with the floodlight system in a 1:1 ratio. I personally think the options are limited to a well designed bandpass, or a good reflex design. Both will be power hungry if limited by cabinet volume. It’s the old word compromise isn’t it. Everything to do with loudspeakers is a compromise.

I’d be interested to hear other peoples views on this seemingly ‘hot’ topic. More importantly how we can make a natural and effortless <50Hz cabinet.