Billed as the UK’s largest indoor winter music event, the TWSTD Festival runs over two back-to-back weekends at Butlins’ holiday camp in Skegness. This year’s event was dubbed Circus 2017 reflecting its theme, and saw Martin Audio partner Stage Audio Services (SAS) fielded a MLA Compact PA.
Contracted by leading event production company Zero Degrees Events, SAS continued its regular role with the festival, flying ten MLA Compact elements per side and ten MLX subs in a broadside array.
‘MLA was proposed by Zero Degrees as a solution to getting the most from the event without having to compromise on noise levels, and the restrictions imposed due to local residents in the area,’ says SAS’ Nat Hopking. ‘But thanks to the way this system works the acoustician monitoring the off-site noise had no issues.’
With DJ EZ, Lethal Bizzie, Hannah Wants, Sigma and Tom Zanetti appearing, SAS had originally hoped to fly hangs of 12 enclosures but this proved unnecessary: ‘In the end, ten was perfectly sufficient as the MLA Compact is incredibly loud for such a small box. We had four [Martin Audio] DD12s available for fills but the way the stage was built, and the position of the barrier, they just weren’t needed.’
Hopking himself acted as system tech and FOH engineer, mapping out the room in the Display software to ensure the measurements were correct, and ‘hard avoiding’ the stage. Consequently he had no trouble reaching the required levels.
‘This box is truly witchcraft,’ he says. ‘At 45m distance I was able to maintain a constant 112dBA at front of house without a hint of struggle from the PA. Then you walk 5m behind front of house and you can have a conversation about how loud it is.’
The production staff as a whole were also hugely impressed by this: ‘Monitor engineer [Henry Cook] loved that my MLX subs moved his wedges around the stage for him,’ Hopking reports.
‘The clarity of the system is fantastic and the amount of volume it generates is truly impressive,’ he adds. ‘The MLX is for me one of the best subs in the world – it’s so musical as well as incredibly powerful.’
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