Marking its 20th anniversary with a total audience of 337,421 and extended to five days, this year’s Rock In Japan festival also marked the Japanese debut of Martin Audio’s flagship Wavefront Precision Longbow (WPL) loudspeaker system.
Running on seven stages over two weekends at Hitachi Seaside Park, Rock In Japan showcases home-grown talent and featured some of Japan’s best acts. Supplied by MSI, Martin Audio systems are now regular fixtures at this event with MLA serving the largest, 70,00-capacity Grass Stage. Here, 20 elements each side formed the main arrays supported by a further 16 cabinets per side as out fill. In addition, 48 MLX subwoofers provided low-frequency extension.
‘It was back in 2011 when we first introduced MLA on the Lake Stage,’ recalls MSI Japan President, Shuzo Fujii. ‘This is now the ninth year that the system has been adopted, and its high degree of control has become essential for the festival. Grass Stage is more than 200m deep, and without the need to use many delay towers, MLA can easily achieve the area coverage. At the same time, we can mitigate the noise pollution offsite – few systems can do that.’
Proving how effective multicellular technology is for a festival of this size, MLA also served the 10,000 capacity Park Stage, the 10,000-capacity Lake Stage and 8,000-capacity the Sound of Forest, with the control offered by MLA helping to prevent unnecessary sound bleed between stages.
But it was in the new Buzz Stage that visiting production teams showed most interest, as it was here that WPL made its debut. Martin Audio’s WPL is the largest format in the new Wavefront Precision lineup of optimised passive arrays, bringing high performance, optimisation, and control but with greater flexibility and cost efficiency to large-scale touring and installation applications. Designed as a complete system with external iKon iK42 multi-channel amplifiers, automated Display optimisation software and VU-Net control platform, the more WPL enclosures with dedicated amplifier channels the greater levels of optimisation resolution is afforded. WPL offers two levels of resolution with One Box (to one amp channel) and Two Box (to one amp channel) available.
WPL incorporates two 12-inch drivers with Hybrid horn/reflex loading, two 6.5-inch cone drivers on a midrange horn which covers the vocal frequency range from 300Hz to 4kHz, and three 1-inch exit HF drivers operating from 4kHz upwards. Each section features innovative horn-loading and refinements which raise the acoustic performance of WPL both in terms of output and smooth 90° horizontal coverage patterns of the mid and HF horns. Sonically, WPL’s horizontal dispersion pattern translates to a consistent frequency response off-axis, with minimal variation from the on-axis response.
Six WPL elements had been flown per side, driven by three iK42 in One Box resolution. In addition, two WPC enclosures were stacked as out fill, along with WPM as lip fill – all driven by iK42 amplifiers. The four iK42s were set up at the side of the stage, connected via a Dante audio network. Thanks to the Luminex Gigacore switch, which has V-Lan settings, Dante primary and secondary as well as the control signals of VU-Net and APEX Intelli-X3 processor were combined into a single optical cable.
Meanwhile, ten MLX subwoofers were set under the stage to meet the needs of DJs and provide plenty of low frequency headroom.
One of the sound engineers on duty – Ryuta Ishizaki from rental company MSI Japan – described the system: ‘The smoothness and transition from low to high frequencies was excellent and easy to control. I liked its punchy low end very much, as thick bass is my favourite. The high end was good as always.
‘The roof of Buzz Stage was made of vinyl and there were concerns about possible sound reflections. But the controllability was such that this wasn’t an issue and I had no difficulty operating the system.’
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