Palmetto Soundworks recently deployed JBL by Harman Professional Solutions VTX Series line arrays to support the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival.
Located on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the three-day festival was inundated with some extremely adverse weather conditions, including high winds and driving rain.
The VTX arrays enabled the team to overcome the elements and deliver audio that complemented some truly incredible performances.
“We were in really poor weather conditions the whole weekend—we gave floating subs a whole new meaning,” said Jared Miller, production manager at Palmetto Soundworks. “The performance of the VTX rig was excellent, even with that much water. I was really impressed with the sound quality and reliability.”
The Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival lineup featured some of the world’s most renowned blues artists, including Joe Bonamassa, The Robert Cray Band, John Mayall, Canned Heat, The Mavericks, Tab Benoit, Heritage Blues Orchestra, Sonny Landreth, Mud Morganfield and many more.
“The high end was really smooth, and the entire VTX system sounded really great out of the box,” said Miller. “A lot of the guest engineers commented on the smoothness of the top end and the overall sound quality. From my point of view as a provider, it’s an easy day for me when guest engineers can start setting up, and it already sounds good. I don’t have to convince anyone of the quality of the VTX rig—engineers come in and know that it will sound good.”
The system Palmetto deployed for the festival included two main arrays of 12 VTX V20 loudspeakers, four ground stacks of three VTX G28 subwoofers, four ground stacks of two VTX S25 subwoofers and two VTX F12 loudspeakers used for front fills. The entire system was powered by Crown VRack 12000HD and VRack 4x3500HD amplifiers, which also performed well despite limited airflow. JBL HiQnet Performance Manager 2.0 software allowed the team to closely monitor the entire system throughout the bad weather.
“Performance Manager 2.0 performed flawlessly—we knew we were going to have bad weather, and the software really allowed us to stay on top of the system,” said Miller. “The VTX arrays and VRack amplifiers performed great through some truly terrible conditions. There were no hiccups in the system.”
