STOKE-ON-TRENT, U.K. — Adlib Audio supported a diverse array of performers at the Love Music Hate Racism Festival 2009, staged at Britannia Stadium, organized by the Stoke City Football (Soccer) Club and Stoke-on-Trent City Council.
The musicians and speakers included Reverend and The Makers, Beverley Knight, The New Beautiful South, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Ironik & Chipmunk, Helsinki, VV Brown, The Beat, Bashy, Mick Jones & the Rotten Hill Gang, Pete Doherty, Eddie Izzard and Kelly Rowland.
Marc Peers served as Adlib’s crew chief and Tony Szabo designed the system, with Dave Kay looking after FOH. To accommodate the audio needs of all performers with quick changeovers, they adopted a festival-style flip-flop system at both ends of the multicore.
The main goal was to produce clarity for both speech and numerous music genres around the stadium for the 20,000 people in the audience. Speakers and other performers were onstage during the changeovers, adding to the challenge of supporting the event.
Szabo chose 16 V-DOSC speaker elements per side for the main arrays on 17-meter towers, coupled with 12 subs per side on the deck, including center fill subs, plus L-Acoustics ARCs and dV-DOSC stacks for front and out fills. L-Acoustics LA8 amplifiers powered the system.
At front of house Kay ran two Soundcraft Vi6 consoles assisted by Declan Fyans who covered the second board. Combining digital and analog preparation techniques, they created show files for all of the bands appearing. These contained basic parameters such as gains, filters, VCA and FX settings.
The drum mix was also copied to all of the bands’ show files so that each band wasn’t starting from scratch. This also gave those turning up with their own engineers the basic building blocks of their show — and with no sound checks, just a quick line check and straight onstage, that helped the production run smoothly and sound its best.
“This is where the Vi6 really comes into its own,” said Kay, who found himself giving intensive Vi6 training to some engineers while the previous band was playing. “You can walk up to it and ‘play’ immediately because of its intuitive layout and easy negotiability”.
Monitor world was looked after by Steve Pattison and Kenny Perrin and was also designed and set up to ensure a steady flow of technical activity between bands throughout the day. It featured two Yamaha PM5D consoles with a Yamaha LS9-32 to run the presenter, speech and DJ channels.
The bands’ backline was moved on and off stage using rolling risers, and Adlib supplied 20 MP3 low profile wedges, all powered by the new Lab.gruppen PLM amps, with inbuilt Lake processing. The sidefills were Nexo Alpha, with a couple of dV-subs to enhance the DJ/drumfills. Sennheiser G2 IEM systems were available for specific bands, but the vast majority used the wedge system.
For more information, please visit www.adlibaudio.co.uk.
