Celebrating its fifth year last month, BottleRock Napa Valley once again marked the unofficial launch of Northern California’s festival and arts season with a three-day, no-holds-barred music, food and wine festival held over the Memorial Day Weekend.
This year included a roster of the world’s top musicians on four stages, including: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Foo Fighters, Maroon 5, and Modest Mouse to name just a few.
Delicate Productions who has provided full production services for the event since it’s inception, for the third time supplied a VUE Audiotechnik based complete house and monitor system on the Miner Family Winery stage. The all-VUE setup encompassed al-Class line arrays, h-Class monitors and subs, as well as a bevy of VUEDrive Systems Engines providing all the loudspeaker power and processing.
The main front of house system consisted of two hybrid CST arrays, each with eight large-format al-12 elements and two medium-format al-8 elements under hung for near field coverage. VUE’s Continual Source Topology (CST) eliminates the disruptions associated with conventional mixed element arrays. Thanks to CST technology, the Delicate team was able to easily achieve precise vertical coverage and sonic consistency, while minimizing hang weight and sight line clutter.
“As BottleRock continues to gain notoriety, expectations from the growing roster of world-class engineers who visit the festival is also increasing,” explains Delicate’s president, Jason Alt. “In terms of sound quality, the VUE al-12 is on-par or better than pretty much any touring rig out there today. But when you factor the ability to create hybrid arrays—with different sized elements working perfectly together—VUE’s versatility is unmatched. We were able go from load-in to fully tuned with perfect coverage in record time.”
For low frequency support, Delicate deployed 15 VUE hs-221 dual 21-inch Infrasonic ACM subwoofers. The subs were positioned along the front of the stage in five groups of three units each. Each group was arranged in a cardioid directional configuration, with two facing forward and one backward to limit the amount of low frequency spillover on stage. Sophisticated DSP from the integrated VUEDrive electronics allowed the complete array to form a virtual arc, which maximized low-frequency consistency throughout the listening area.
“We’ve been big fans of VUE’s ACM subwoofers for more than three years now,” concludes Alt. “They easily get lower and louder than anything their size, and DSP capabilities allow us to dial in some pretty sophisticated low frequency arrays. We lover their versatility.”
Rounding out the system were VUE hm-212 and hm-112 stage monitors, while a pair of h-15 two-way boxes atop hs-28 subwoofers delivered side fill. A VENUE Profile console served front of house duty, while a Yamaha PM5D handled monitors.
Performers on the Miner Family Winery stage this year included: Doobie Decibel System, The California Honeydrops, Bob Moses, Allunageorge, Parade of Lights, Elephant Revival, Con Brio, Charles Bradley and Giraffage, Mavis Staples, Chris Shiflett, and Galactic.
“Out of the gate festival style and the mix took very little to get sorted,” remarked Max Damian, front of house engineer for Con Brio. “Loads of punch and clarity that did not mind being pushed. Greg [from VUE] said I had headroom, but the festival db limit prevented a test of sheer horsepower. The people in the crowd were dancing. I was dancing at the console. A good day.”
