Working with our good friends at Liz Hobbs Group we were tasked to provide the front of house audio system for Newark Festival 2018. This festival brings in a few thousand visiting public and operates over 3 days – Friday is tribute night, Saturday is 80s day with the headliner being Marti Pellow, and Sunday being family day.
Previously carried out with a D&B V or J series system, we needed to match or better the previous system design with our TW AUDiO equipment.
The System
We chose to use VERA36 with a combination of S33 and BSX subs, bringing in the brand new VERA20 box for front fill.
Mains
Starting with the main arrays, we hand a long, thin site to cover with no real remit for putting delays in and a need to keep within reasonable noise limits – the site location being centrally located to Newark and surrounded by housing.
As such, we opted to put in 12 VERA36 per side as flown arrays but extending the line and the low end with a pair of S33 subs at the top of the hang. This gave us ample coverage along the site but also restricting outward spill beyond the perimeter.
The VERA36 box comprises of 2 x 10″ drivers, 2 x 8″ drivers and 2 x 1.4″ compression drivers to reproduce incredibly powerful and controllable audio.
Subs
The subs array was designed with BSXs in the centre and S33s spreading outward. BSX’s were used in 2 sets of 3 boxes with the middle box reversed to produce a cardioid format. The rear rejection using the twin 21″ boxes in this format is incredible and heavily reduces the rear spill onto stage.
Spreading out from there on 1.2m spacings were the S33s. Stacked in pairs, we had 4 stacks per side – a total of 16 boxes on the floor. We were able to alter the delay timings for the subs to decrease the left/right spill into unwanted areas and keep the low frequencies going in the direction of the crowd.
The S33 sub includes a front facing 18″ driver and a rear facing 15″ driver creating a native cardioid box. This box has some of the best rear rejection of low frequency on the market and it really helps to keep down unwanted sound.
The BSX is a twin 21″ sub that has a massive amount of power it can deliver in any scenario. Best used in threes as a cardioid array.
Front Fill
Deploying the new VERA20 for front fill gave us the same voicing as the VERA36 to provide a seemless sound across the front rows of the audience.
The VERA20 is very similar to the 36 but a smaller format without the 8″ drivers.
VIP Area
The VIP Area needed some additional fill due to its close location to the stage but off to one side. As such, we used a small stack of 3 VERA10 boxes (the smallest of the line arrays) to cover this area.
The VERA10 comprises of a 10″ driver and 2 x 1″ compression driver.
Amplification
The whole system was driven off Lab Gruppen PLM12k44 in Tourrack configurations of 3 amplifiers per rack. We used 7 amplifiers to feed the floor mounted sub array, and 3 amplifiers for each flown array. An additional amplifier was used to run the delay feed in the VIP area.
The amplifiers were all connected via Dante for the primary audio feed and a redundant analogue feed for backup.
System Control
Keeping with Lab Gruppen, we always use LM44 processors for our systems control. This allows us to easily switch between continuity and visiting artist consoles without any interruption to ongoing audio. This also allows us to provide both analogue and digital input at the choice of the visiting engineer.
FOH Control
Alongside visiting consoles, we also deployed our Allen and Heath dLive S7000 and DM64 as the main house console, with a secondary Digidesign Profile as the second house desk. The combination of Allen and Heath, Lab Gruppen and TW AUDiO works absolutely faultlessly from our perspective and we are yet to find something that works better.
Finally, for continuity we fitted an Allen and Heath R72 with iDR10 on stage for announcements and background music to allow us to switch control desks as and when needed.
If you would like to find out more about this event, or how we could help you with a similar event – get in touch using our Contact Page