When Rome’s DNA Concerti decided to launch a brand new festival in a small picturesque town on the Aburzzo Adriatic coast of Italy, they contacted Blackout to provide the audio, lighting and video for the four-day festival. Blackout in turn delivered Outline PAs for each of the stages at the festival.
“We worked for months on ensuring the success of the festival, which involved approximately forty bands from Italy and abroad,” explains Blackout owner Gaetano. “Meeting everybody’s requirements was no easy job.”
The festival included screenings of films and music-themed documentaries as well as countless DJ sets and concerts by numerous Italian bands and headliners including The Drones, Dry The River, John Grant, Mogwai, The National and Alexis Taylor.
The sound systems increased in size from the Outline DVS enclosures installed for the small stages at the Palazzo d’Avalos gardens and Rotonda Viale Dalmazia, through the Arena delle Grazie, where bands had at their disposal 6+6 Outline Mantas and two DBS 18-2 subs. Another stage at the courtyard of the 16th century Palazzo d’Avalos, was equipped with two main hangs of twelve Mantas systems and six DBS 18-2 subwoofers.
The town square (Piazza del Popolo) hosted the main stage, which featured a wide variety of genres. For this stage Blackout fielded two main hangs of twelve Outline Butterfly line array elements and eight Outline DBS 18-2 subs.
“The Outline Line Array was very nice to work with, the crossover between the main array and the subs was pretty smooth and the main array had excellent coverage with minimal comb filtering as I moved across the axis,” adds Kenny MacLeod, production manager and FOH engineer for Mogwai. “The HF was very pleasant and in no way did it sound harsh, even though it was very hi-fi and had a very musical presence to it.”
After the event, Lombardi stressed his satisfaction, “We proposed our rigs with Outline PAs and monitors and the various sound engineers’ enthusiastic response was confirmed during the event, at which we good numerous positive comments from the ‘users’ – as always, the Outline brand is an international guarantee of quality!”
