Code Of Practice

Complete Correlation
This year’s BottleRock Festival in Napa, CA (Summer’s Leading Edge, July 2015 LSI) represented the third time out for an Erevu system at the popular Wine Country event. Front of house engineer Sebastien Poux, who oversaw activities for Delicate Productions at the Miner Family Winery Stage, concurs with Wilson’s preference for C-weighting.

“Over the years, we’ve always been walking on eggshells around the low frequencies at these shows,” Poux says. “They would be the ones that always put us ultimately into the red. What was great about the Erevu system this year was that I could see everything.

“If I heard too much bass, I didn’t have to mute all of the bass frequencies,” he continues. “I simply modified those where the problems showed themselves. This really helped me when I was dealing with guest engineers too. I didn’t have to tell them to change their mix in order to be compliant with the local noise regulations. I could just show them where things were a little hot and needed to come down a notch.

“With C-weighting you get all the frequency content for the signals you’re measuring. When you have those kinds of numbers in front of you, it unleashes your creativity to a much larger extent. What you hear and what you see on your monitor screen correlate completely.”

No engineer likes to be tapped on the shoulder while mixing and be told to turn it down. Taking that into consideration, one of the real strengths of an Erevu system is the ability it provides for engineers to self-regulate themselves. At BottleRock, if there was a problem, they could assess the situation in real-time and correct it almost immediately.

Bird’s-Eye View
At the hub of the BottleRock noise monitoring system was Erevu’s command center/production office, manned this time out by Louis Adamo of Hi-Tech Audio. Seated before multiple monitors, Adamo had a bird’s-eye view of measured data streamed in real-time from all remote locations both internal and external to the festival.

Screenshots of the Leq and other information measured over time at multiple stages at BottleRock 2015. While the Miner Family Winery Stage faced south toward the Napa River, two of the other main stages faced residential and commercial areas. Both showed significant improvement with regard to noise mitigation, despite Erevu moving its measurement locations outside the grounds 1,000 feet closer to both stages.

Inside, monitoring stations were setup at each stage. Outside, monitoring stations were placed in strategic areas within the community. From his post, Adamo could view everything happening from at that moment to over the course of a day or the entire weekend at any station. Beyond the Leq and other acoustical information, weather data was available as well for air temperature, barometric pressure, wind speeds, humidity, precipitation, and all other relevant factors.