The Palms Stage at the recent FNGRS CRSSD festival at Waterfront Park in San Diego, which hosted EDM performances over the course of two days, was equipped with a main sound reinforcement system headed by JBL Professional VTX Series line arrays and subwoofers provided by San Diego-based Show Imaging.
“For me, when I started Show Imaging in 2014, JBL VRX Series was one of the first production products that we purchased,” says company president Steve Q. Evans. “It was a great catch-all box for what we were doing at the time. HARMAN and JBL trusted us, and we trusted them. This trust has remained and grown over the years. We bought A8s, and we were on the fence about investing in A12 speakers because they hadn’t had as much exposure in the EDM market yet.
“By summer of 2022, we were completely confident that the A12 speakers and B28 subwoofers were the next progression for our production inventory. By that time, we were growing bigger as a company and working on larger and higher profile jobs. CRSSD was a great opportunity for us to prove that VTX systems are phenomenal solutions for the EDM market.”
To keep stage volume and sound bleed to a minimum, the Palms Stage system consisted of a modest stage left-right hang of eight JBL VTX A12 line arrayss (four loudspeakers per side), two A12W frontfills and 16 B28 subwoofers. Rather than focusing all the firepower in the stage hang, the team elected to distribute energy throughout the audience with 56 VTX A8 compact line array loudspeakers assembled as 14 four-box delays
“This project had very specific needs in terms of coverage and strict limits on allowable SPL levels,” says Darrell Henry, chief operating officer, Show Imaging. “We met these requirements using a distributed system with 16 different hangs in a fairly small space. The boxes are well-behaved acoustically; we can get a full and rich audio experience for the audience where we need it without excess sound bleeding elsewhere. We received nothing but positive feedback about the sound system on the Palms Stage. There was a consistent theme that VTX A series can stand side by side with any other high level competitor on the market.”
The Show Imaging team adds that the compatibility of VTX A12 and A8 contributed to the success of their distributed delay configuration. “JBL VTX A-Series provides two significant benefits for us when designing and deploying the systems,” Henry concludes. “The first is the similarity in voicing and performance of the high frequencies between A12 and A8. This allows us to mix and match the boxes in our designs to meet weight limitations and venue-specific challenges.
“The second benefit is that the boxes are very predictable in their frequency response and coverage, virtually eliminating the need for onsite changes once we’ve calculated our designs.”
