Marking its 30^th anniversary with performances from the likes of Wayne Shorter, John Scofield, the Brand New Heavies and Kool and The Gang’s, the Stockholm Jazz Festival took place on Skeppsholmen Island recently.

The sound/light/stage production was handled by Live Media Group. With Bromma-based Electrosound providing an audio system based on an Alcons LR16 loudspeaker rig. System designers Brollan Söderström fom Electrosound, and Robert Karlsson from LMG had limited space to work with the festival’s two stages. These alternate between artists - so while one is in use, the other is being set up for the next artist. The Alcons system featured three clusters, with a common centre hang.

‘Because the site is constricted, there was no space to fly the LR16B bass cabinets on the side of the LR16s, so we flew them behind the LR16s and time delayed the LR16 arrays back to the LR16Bs,’ says Brollan. ‘Similarly, we had three ground stacks of two 18-inch subs, each one designed as an end-fire array, with four boxes in one row and another set of four boxes behind. These were spaced with the distance matching half a wavelength at 55Hz and time aligned accordingly.

‘We stacked them on each side of the centre monitors, so the audience at the front really felt that the sound was coming from the stage and not from the sides,’ says Brollan. ‘We were limited to 105dB, but the system provided excellent coverage and clarity, with plenty of punch. The biggest challenge was having bands playing more-or-less non-stop, so we had very limited opportunities for soundchecks.

‘We had Alcons VR8s for FOH near fills and the engineers had to trust what they heard in them during a quick sound/line check before each act. Thanks to the similarity in the construction of the VR8 and the LR16, the sound in the VR8s matched the main system sound remarkably well, which gave each engineer a very good starting point.

‘I was talking a few days later to Kool and The Gang’s FOH engineer, He said that he wished he’d had an Alcons system at the show they did the day after Stockholm Jazz. I think that says a lot.’