The LA Rising festival hosted more than 60,000 people and featuring a rare appearance by Rage Against the Machine in the band’s only concert of the year to date.
Held in late July at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the festival also featured performances by Muse, Rise Against, Lauryn Hill, Immortal Technique and El Gran Silencio.
Sound Image of Escondido, CA designed and deployed the sound system under the direction of director of touring Mike Sprague.
The system included 132 JBL VerTec VT4889 full-size line array elements and 110 VT4880 full-size arrayable subwoofers for the main system and for the three delay towers, along with eight VT4889 arrays and eight VT4880 subs for stage monitoring and side fill. Crown Audio I-Tech HD Series power amplifiers – 152 in total – drove the loudspeakers.
Four columns of 18 VT4889 loudspeakers and four columns of 18 VT4880 subs—eight columns total—were hung on either side of four poles that held up the roof of the stage structure (along with two poles in the back).
Two out fill arrays of 12 VT4889s were placed at the left and the right of the stage facing 90 degrees outward from the front. Two stacks of 10 VT4880 subs were placed at the foot of the left and right front of the stage along with 18 VT4880’s at the center of the stage to provide low-frequency ground-level coverage. There were three delay towers behind the front of house position, each with 12 VT4889s.
“We really didn’t face any major acoustical challenges. We just put in enough PA so that all 60,000 people were covered with volume and clarity,” says Sprague. “Getting the delay towers in the right position was a bit of a task, and getting enough AC power from the generators to run the system wasn’t easy. Ultimately we got what we needed by using 400 amps of 3-phase power for each side of the stage and 200 amps of 3-phase for the delay towers.”
“We continue to use VerTec for major events like this because our success with JBL components has been second to none, and we have a longstanding track record with them,” he adds. “We use VerTec because of the superior sound quality and reliability. The Crown amps also performed as one would expect from a very reliable amplifier provider.”
