The Wireless Festival, now in its ninth consecutive year, is the quintessential urban open-air music experience, with headliners Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, will.i.am, Snoop Dog, A Tribe Called Quest, and Rita Ora drawing record crowds to London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
A Turbosound Flashline PA was deployed by Britannia Row Productions for the Pepsi Max Stage, which also saw appearances by Calvin Harris and Tinie Tempah.
Britannia Row Productions’ Johnny Keirle was systems tech for the event and, despite arriving in the UK from New Zealand recently, has seen plenty of Flashline action.
“I’m pretty familiar with Turbosound as I worked a lot with Oceania back in New Zealand, they have a large Flashlight and Floodlight rig that’s one of the best sounding systems around. The very first time I heard Flashline, I loved it. Since then, the more I work with Flashline the more I like it,” he says.
“Mechanically, the rigging is very well thought out. The flying and angling system is very thoughtfully laid out and labeled, making it easy and straightforward to put in the air. With four boxes to a dolly you can set the majority of angles on the ground, resulting in a quick and easy flying process.
“The flybar case is a clever design and it’s tidy and compact. Flashline is extremely easy to put in the air and equally importantly, very easy to land after a long day’s work!”
For the Pepsi Max Stage – which measured about 100 metres by 50 metres wide– Turbosound’s latest large scale line array system consisted of 10 TFS-900H high packs flown per side, with six each TFS-900B subs at left and right, plus a centre stack of six TFS-900Bs.
Extra subs were added to the original specification in order to beef up the sub-bass frequencies for will.i.am and the festival’s hugely popular and predominantly electronic-based hip-hop, RnB and rap artist line-up.
Flashline is a complete turnkey sound reinforcement system designed to deliver ultra-high quality audio to large audiences. The TFS-900H is a four-way flown line array comprising 11 discrete drive units uniquely deployed across four frequency bands, teamed up with Lab.gruppen’s industry-leading four channel DSP-based amplifiers with Lake processing in custom-designed Turbosound racks.
The TFS-900B subs are a hybrid-loaded design that makes use of energy from the rear as well as the front of the 18-inch neodymium drivers’ cones for an impressive 141dB peak output. The Flashline high packs travel pre-rigged in groups of four on custom dollies allowing a loudspeaker array to be flown quickly and easily.
An EASE Focus plot run on the morning of the festival set up day helped to determine the optimum inter-box angles, which were then implemented while still on the dollies.
“It takes only five or ten minutes to go through the configuration to make sure it’s going to look good, and once you’ve got them in the air you can trim levels accordingly from the Lake software,” explains Keirle. “We can do that because of the way the racks are configured.
“I’m running the top three cabinets on one amplifier channel, the next three on one channel, and the bottom four as two pairs. This way we have a lot of control over the directivity of the array – such as trimming the lower cabinets back quite a bit at the bottom to hit the first 30 metres, and as it’s around 100 metres to the back we’re going to push the tops to achieve that long throw. There are no delays at all, which is great from the audience’s point of view.”
