The two-day Lone Star Jam country music festival takes place a half-hour outside Austin, Texas, at the Round Rock Amp venue each year for the past 15 years. The 2024 event featured performances by 16 Texas red dirt country singers and bands, headlined by Lee Brice and Robert Earl Keen.
Thomas Smith, co-owner of Show Gear Systems (SGS) Professional Production Services company has been involved in the festival for ten years, providing a wide range of gear including PA, front line, back line, monitors, lighting and power. This year, the PA employed was a TT+ Audio GTX system from RCF, comprising 12 GTX 12 three-way line array modules per side as mains, six GTX 10 modules for front fill sitting atop six three-high groundstacked GTS 29 subwoofers (a total of 18 GTS 29s). Thre GTX 10 provided out fill, with 18 XPS 16K four-channel DSP amplifiers for power.
‘When our local rep began talking to me about the flagship TT+ Audio line I was interested, but what really caught my eye was when Wayne Pauley, production manager and front-of-house engineer for Lee Brice, shared his enthusiasm for the GTX line array system,’ Smith says.
Pauley had arranged for the system to be in Texas for the Jam. ‘I was then able to work out that we had the PA for Friday, Saturday and Sunday,’ Smith says.
The Friday load-in gave him the opportunity to talk in depth about the rig, the cabling, software and how it flies with veteran live sound specialist Michael Lawrence, who worked as TT+ Audio’s GTX system tech for the show.
‘You can simply look at the system and make sure that everything’s been pinned correctly because if it isn’t, there’s either a big yellow dot on the side or a big yellow stripe on the back,’ says Smith. ‘It is all recessed and all protected for transport. I really like that too.’
At the heart of the system are 18 RCF XPS 16K high-power four-channel amplifiers with DSP processing. XPS series amplifiers are intended for use with high-performance speakers and provide ready-to-use configurations and presets for RCF passive speakers, including the flagship TT+ Audio GTX series. The XPS amplifiers have tremendous processing power, all managed and monitored through RCF’s RDNet software. In addition to the RDNet control, the XPS 16K features a large touchscreen.
In Texas, the concept of a passive line array has appeal for blistering hot summer days that leave powered cabinets with passive cooling in danger of overheating, plus the ability to assign amplifier resources ensures ample clean headroom. ‘The big thing a lot of times is the weight, especially when you’re doing smaller shows,’ Smith adds, where rigging capacity is limited, and lighter passive cabinets allow more loudspeakers to be hung.
‘No matter how loud you got it, it was still very clean and very smooth and natural sounding, with even coverage front to back,’ he reports. ‘If I went from the front of the stage all the way to the very back bar, which was around 300ft, the vocal range of the system was very, very smooth front to back. I was really impressed by the off-axis performance. There’s a lot of shows we do where I wouldn’t feel the need to hang an out fill because of the way GTX covers.’
As additional GTX 10s were available, three were used for a beer garden off of stage right. ‘It gave me a way to really listen to the 10s, and then step into the main hang and just hear how smooth it was transitioning from the 10s to the 12s,’ Smith says.
On the second day of the Jam, Smith asked that the subs be configured cardioid. ‘When the first band started on the second day, I thought there was a problem in front of house. I didn’t think the PA was on. I was standing on deck and all I could hear was drums and guitar amps and bass rigs. Even the first day you could tell the subs were banging, but the tops, the way that box is designed, you don’t get that blow back on the stage that I’ve experienced with other manufacturers.’
Smith pronounced the subs, sonically ‘awesome’.
More: www.ttaudio.com
