Electric Avenue, New Zealand’s largest outdoor summer music festival that’s held in Christchurch, this year drew record crowds of 25,000 who were delivered concert sound reinforcement headed by d&b audiotechnik loudspeakers and related components.
The festival relied heavily on local talent, with more than 35 Kiwi artists including Benee, Fat Freddy’s Drop and Tiki Taane performing across multiple stages in Hagley Park, Christchurch. Western Audio, the audio supplier for the Park Stage, recommended d&b SL-Series (KSL and GSL) as mains and also utilized d&b’s ArrayProcessing line array optimization software function and NoizCalc noise prediction software.
“To enable the festival to go ahead, strict council noise limits needed to be met,” explains Richard McMenamin, Director, Western Audio Engineering. “ArrayProcessing and NoizCalc were vital in the planning stages of the event to model and mitigate any noise issues before they were encountered. GSL and KSL were chosen for the Park Stage due to their superb sound quality and their excellent pattern control.”
Specific components serving the stage include 20 GSL8 and four GSL12 loudspeakers as mains, a dozen V8s for the sides, four V7Ps and eight Y7Ps for fills, 12 SL subwoofers, and another12 KSL8s for delays. All loudspeakers were driven by D80 amplifiers with Dante networking.
Artist and sound engineer Tiki Taane was in a unique position to experience the full potential of the loudspeakers systems, both while performing on the Park Stage and mixing front of house sound for the headline act, Shapeshifter, on the same stage.
“The d&b SL System was next level huge,” Taane says. “The clarity and frequency response to all the little mix adjustments I was making was unbelievable. I do a lot of EQ filter sweeps on the synth bass, and also on the reverb return channels for those exciting moments in the songs, and the energy coming from the d&b System was mind blowing. There was so much head room and fatness that I was more than happy with sitting the mix at 109 db at mix position, knowing that there was still more in the tank for those big moments.”
Taane also commented that for such a large crowd, the feedback they received from the festival goers was quite positive, even those who were positioned way in the back, well beyond the delay lines. Meanwhile, festival production manager Bevan Hancox (Dexta) adds that sound avoided disturbing the neighboring communities.
“We are happy with the outcome of this well-deployed rig and proud to use d&b audiotechnik,” Hancox concludes. “It covers all my bases and keeps the touring engineers, audience members and the promoter happy. As always, the definition was crystal clear. “
