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Delicate Productions Deploys Martin Audio For Main & Second Stages At BottleRock 2015

MLA and W8LC systems for the main (Intel) and second (JamCellars) stages, respectively at this year's festival in Napa, CA

Delicate Productions (Los Angeles & San Francisco) provided Martin Audio MLA and W8LC systems for the main (Intel) and second (JamCellars) stages respectively at this year’s BottleRock Festival in Napa, CA.

The diverse talent roster included Imagine Dragons, No Doubt, Robert Plant, The Avett Brothers, Snoop Dogg, Public Enemy, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Los Lobos and and many others. Delicate faced an additional challenge due to a noise ordinance in Napa.

The system for the Intel main stage included of 16 MLA enclosures joined by two MLD enclosures per side for the main hangs. These were joined by 24 MLX subwoofers, 12 W8LM cabinets for front fill and 8 W8LCs for the off stage VIP hang. Sixteen MLA Compact enclosures were deployed as delays.

The second stage system consisted of 15 Martin Audio W8LC and 2 W8LCD down fill cabinets a side with 18 WS218X subwoofers and 6 W8LMD cabinets for front fill, all powered by Martin Audio MA4.2s power amplifiers.

Delicate Productions president Jason Alt states, “BottleRock has been successful for us since its inception. This year went just as well, which was challenging because we do sound, lights and video for three stages. In terms of sound control, there’s a very strict noise ordinance in town; on property at front of house, it’s 105 dB C-weighted and beyond the festival ground it’s 65 dB C-weighted, so we work with a company to handle the noise mitigation and with the artists while they’re sound checking or performing, especially those who are low frequency-dependent.

“We’re able to stay within those guidelines by providing real-time monitoring so all an engineer has to do while mixing is look over at a screen to see if they’re within that noise ordinance zone and if they aren’t, the system will ask them to turn it down.

“The use of MLA, particularly on the main stage, which is less than 200 feet to the nearest house, has been incredibly helpful,” Alt continues. “We do a broadside array for the main stage and steer the subs almost 90 degrees away from that side of the property because of the control Display gives you and the efficiency of the MLX. So you still literally get subwoofer in front of the barricade, but what is aiming at that house is almost a 30 dB drop-off because of the way it’s steered. And we have full coverage including subs to the edge of the property because of what we can do with MLA. That’s a big part of it.

“And of course there’s the ability to steer MLA, where we’re dropping the main array off 50 or 60 feet past front of house,” he adds. This year we went back to using delays to fill in some of the high end at the rear of the property, but even those are steered down about 20 feet from where the food vendors are so the listening experience is still good but you’re not screaming at them to place your order, especially in a festival that’s relying on a high end customer experience for the food and wine part of it.

Key Delicate Productions crew at the festival included Makato Araki (lead sudio systems engineer) and Craig Robertson (system tech), Andy Turner (FOH A1), Shaun Sebastian (mon A1), Greg Rideout (stage patch) and Ryan Trefethen (RF tech) at the main stage, while Kyle Anderson (FOH tech), Andrew Freid (monitor mech), Rob Speight (stage patch), and Sergei Bailleul (RF tech) worked the second stage.

“Despite the wide range of artists at BottleRock, everything from rap to classic and indie rock, punk and jazz, all of the engineers had a really great show,” Alt concludes. “Robert Plant’s engineer Roy Williams mixed on MLA for the first time and he liked it a lot. It was also the first time No Doubt experienced MLA with us in a smaller environment and their front of house engineer JK (John Kerns) told us after the show that the system really performed and he got everything he needed out of it. We had a lot of positive feedback about MLA, which is not unusual at this point.

“For stage two with W8LC, we normally use MLA Compact, but the rest of the system was out on tour. And we had nothing but compliments for that too. Because W8LC performed really well and we didn’t even have to struggle to keep it within the noise ordinance limits.”

Martin Audio
Delicate Productions

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