Performing at the seafront Hove Lawns in Brighton, Groove Armada, Jocelyn Brown, and DJ Todd Terry headlined the recent Glorious Day festival, with sound reinforcement and optimised noise control in the residential environment from dBS Solutions using a Martin Audio WPC system.
‘Hove Lawns is a very long, thin area with the beach to the audience’s left and rows of flats and shops along the road to the right,’ says dBS Solutions’ Chris Bogg. ‘The nearest residence is in line with one side of the stage, at a distance of only 60m. The Martin Audio broadside cardioid subwoofer array is fantastic at being able to control noise off to the sides, and we were able to use Hard Avoid features within the software to dramatically reduce noise behind the main array.’
The scalable system comprised ten Martin Audio WPC array elements per side as the main hangs. Extending low-end performance was a castellated array of ten Martin Audio SXH118 subwoofers in a cardioid set-up.
The scalable nature of the Wavefront Precision platform has proved invaluable to the rental company. ‘One of the major things for us when comparing Martin Audio against other products on the market was the scalable resolution,’ Bogg notes. ‘As a rental company, I can own lots of amplifier racks; one day I can deploy them in a one-box resolution for a premium audio system, and the next event, if we don’t have off-site noise problems, I can deploy it in a two-box resolution [a single amplifier channel driving two array elements in parallel] and use those amplifiers on another site.’
A particular challenge for the team was a residential and commercial area situated on one side just beyond the far reaches of the 80m-long site, requiring careful placement of the delay systems.
‘We had two MLAC delay systems along that left-hand side happily firing almost across the audience and out towards the sea,’ Bogg continues. ‘The city-facing delay was angled in more than you ordinarily would, specifically to keep those high frequencies from spilling beyond the boundary of the site.’
Throughout the event, dBS Solutions used Martin Audio Display optimisation software to create multiple levels of coverage predictions. By experimenting with different optimisations and collaborating closely with the local noise control team, they delivered a perfect balance of on-site impact within the stringent off-site noise limitations.
‘Our journey has always been towards being able to do our biggest work, which is the festival work, and to be able to optimise the systems – and I think Martin Audio do that better than most. They are the originators of that process, level of control, and scalability,’ Bogg says. ‘Once again, Martin Audio delivered a fantastic result for us and the client – not to mention the festival’s neighbours.’