Ningbo, China (July 7, 2016)—World Music Day was recently celebrated in more than 450 cities in 120 countries around the world, including at the “Croisements Festival” at the 3rd Ningbo Fête de la Musiqué at the Ningbo Cultural Plaza in China. VUE Audiotechnik provided both the PA system and technical support for the festival, which debuted the company’s large format al-12 Scalable Line Array loudspeaker system.
It was VUE’s first public festival in China, playing for nearly ten thousand people. VUE headquarters sent two support staff — Alex Schloesser of Global Marketing, in charge of the APAC Market for VUE and Systems Technician Josh Cruz based in VUE’s headquarters in California — to support the event.
Acoustic challenges on-site included a number of tall buildings with glass and concrete walls along the sides of the plaza. VUE technical support combined their live sound experience with Ease Focus simulation results to provide an optimal solution for the event.
The FOH mix position was located at a significant 200-plus foot distance from the stage, practically at the end of the audience area. The top boxes of the PA were aimed at the mix position, dropping off only a few feet past the FOH, thus avoiding the sound hitting the imminent glass structure behind and creating unwanted reflections. “The environment was quite unforgiving with all the reflecting surfaces, but only 2-3 EQ filters were added to the factory supplied one-box presets to counteract the environment — the system sounded quite impressive right out of the box,” comments Cruz.
VUE’s al-Class line array systems were paired with VUEDrive Systems Engines for amplification and networked DSP. Each side of the main PA consisted of eight al-12 High Output Line Array cabinets hung over four al-8 Line Array cabinets used for down-fill. Additional front-fill was provided by four stacks of two al-8s arrayed on top of six hs-28 subs on their side, in front of the stage. At the two sides of the stage, four al-4 subcompact line array cabinets stacked on one hs-28 were used for side fills. A four-tall dual 21-inch hs-221 subwoofer ground stack was added both left and right for additional low-end extension.
The recommendation from VUE was to place the new dual 21-inch hs-221 subwoofers across the front of the stage in a continuous cardioid configuration, but due to some resistance from festival organizers concerned about the video crew’s dolly access to the stage lip, the subs were stacked 4-high per side, roughly underneath of each al-Class array with an additional six hs-28 subs arrayed at the center in 1m intervals to allow video crew access, with every second sub supporting a pair of front fill al-8 cabinets on top.
VUE Audiotechnik
www.vueaudio.com
