Having supplied Martin Audio PA rigs to both stages at Glastonbury and in support of Queens of the Stone Age at Cardiff Castle, rental company SWG Events returned to the castle grounds for shows with Sir Tom Jones. The second of three shows saw support by another native son, Stereophonics front man Kelly Jones, leading his own spin-off band, Far From Saints.
Cardiff Castle has become a new venue for SWG Events, and so a meticulous design was undertaken for Sir Tom Jones where the optimisation of the system was of paramount importance. ‘The PA had to avoid the walls surrounding the castle green to avoid any slapback,’ says SWG Head of Audio, Simon Purse. ‘This was crucial and having Display [D3 software] really helped. Also, since the castle is in the the city centre, keeping noise pollution to a minimum was essential – and we had no reported issues offsite at all, as was also the case with Queens of the Stone Age.’
The stage is a permanent fixture at the castle throughout the summer. ‘Previously we had left and right hang of 12 WPL and an out hang of ten WPC on stage right to cover some of the audience and the disabled access platform, but we also deployed a similar out hang on stage left to add to the symmetry of the system. Everything worked seamlessly as WPC sounds so similar to the WPL, you don’t have to do a lot to it since it is voiced the same.’
There was another slight modification in that the WPC delay, which they had originally imposed more as a precaution, was removed as being unnecessary, as the flagship Wavefront Precision system could provide sufficient coverage for the 8,000 who assembled.
In addition, SWG set four WPC as front fill, positioned on the stage apron, and Torus T1530 with SXC118 cardioid subwoofers, two of each per side, firing inwards. They supplied 12 Martin Audio XE500 wedges a house monitor system, as required.
SWG Events was working for a number of promoters over the run of shows, with Technical Production Manager Ian Williams, praising the system: ‘Both the FOH and monitor rigs have been well received by the touring engineers who have passed through the event,’ he says. Their FOH supervisor and system tech was Matt Pope, while Oliver Haward was on monitors and Sam Jones was on patch.
Simon Purse had created a generic visualisation plan in Martin Audio’s Display 3, handing over to Pope to fine tune on site. The main focus was on the subwoofers, as Purse explains. ‘We added a couple more subs in order to deploy a castellated cardioid broadside array – delayed in an arc which helps us control the horizontal dispersion of the array.’ In total, they fielded 14 SXH, nine forward facing, five rear facing.
‘The new subwoofer tool in D3 enables you to calculate the dispersion a lot easier – it’s now in the software rather than on spreadsheets and to be honest it works really well and is notably smooth,’ he adds.
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