The annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival marked 50 years in front of an audience of 475,000 people, with a diverse range of artists performing on more than a dozen stages. This year’s festival called A/V production company Propaganda Group – a supplier to the event for many years – for the audio system for the Jazz and Heritage Stage and other locations. A key element of Propaganda Group’s audio set-up – which needed to provide clear, powerful sound for a wide array of musical styles – was the new ShowMatch compact line array system from Bose Professional.

In alignment with Bose DeltaQ technology principles, two eight-box main arrays included four ShowMatch SM5 5-degree boxes, one SM10 10° box and one SM20 20° box per side. Four ShowMatch front fill was on the deck. A total of 15 SMS118 subwoofers on the ground were configured in cardioid arrays by groups of three, to provide a high degree of directional control for the low frequency energy.

Artists served by Propaganda Group on the Jazz & Heritage Stage included the Storyville Stompers Brass Band, Big Chief Juan & Jockimo’s Groove, Caesar Brothers Funkbox and Mariachi Jalisco. ‘This was my first time mixing on the Bose ShowMatch system,’ Jeffrey Gex notes. ‘It performed well throughout the festival

Gex, whose credits include work with the Neville Brothers and Yes, oversaw the system as FOH at the Jazz and Heritage Stage: ‘Having that many subwoofers available while trying to stay below 100dB was challenging,’ he reports. ‘But the cardioid preset for the subs seemed to really work – it was well-controlled, focused, right in the middle. If you walked around the edges of our audience area, you’d notice that it tapered off to the sides nicely.’

The Bose ShowMatch system enclosure’s unique electro-acoustical design includes four 2-inch compression drivers complementing a pair of high-powered, long-excursion eight-inch loudspeakers. These high-frequency drivers are crossed over at 750Hz, which helps to keep the crossover point out of the vocal range. This system design characteristic is intended to provide improved system clarity, by not transitioning between the eight-inch drivers and the two-inch drivers when input to the system in the centre of the vocal region changes in frequency.