BRIDGEPORT, Barbados – Quality Sound Inc. (QSI) provided sound gear from D.A.S. Audio for the thousands who turned out for Crop Over, a five-week summer festival.
Revived in 1974, the celebrations date back to the 1780s, marking the completion of the seasonal sugar cane harvests on the island. The festival is a showcase for Barbadian culture, and this year's festival featured Calypso music performances and competitions.
In addition to sales and rentals of music and audio equipment, QSI operates a sound services division for live events, a recording studio and a design/build division for the installation market. The company also serves as a promoter of live events, and was contracted to provide sound reinforcement for several activities during this year's festival.
"For Crop Over 2010, we provided sound reinforcement for an all-day Calypso competition called Soca Royale," said Austral Estwick, co-owner of QSI. "We also provided sound for the Calypso Finals, Cohoblopot (a six-hour exhibition of calypso and cultural performances), as well as ‘10 to 10', a 12-hour show of Calypso music.
"The Calypso Finals had roughly 8,000 spectators, Cohoblopot had 10,000, and Soca Royale and ‘10 to 10' each had approximately 20,000 people," Estwick noted. "We knew that we needed our big guns," he added, referring to QSI's D.A.S. Aero 50 and Aero 48 line array systems.
For Soca Royale, held at Bushy Park, QSI deployed 24 Aero 50 3-way, large format, active line arrays-flown 12 elements per side-along with 24 LX-218 high power subwoofers, positioned with 12 enclosures per side. "We had even coverage throughout the area and sound quality was absolutely consistent for the entire day," Estwick said. "We averaged 115 dB SPL at the mix position, which was located about 200 feet from the stage."
For the Calypso Finals, which took place at the Kensington Oval cricket stadium, Estwick and his crew deployed an Aero 50 system consisting of eight enclosures per side. Sub bass tasks were aptly handled by the D.A.S. LX-218 subwoofers, positioned eight cabinets per side. "This was a challenging setup," Estwick recalled. "We were projecting the sound into the stands that had high reflection and considerable slap back, so we had to conduct quite a bit of testing and modeling of the system in order to obtain the speech intelligibility we wanted. It rained quite a bit, which shortened our setup and testing window, but because of the system's excellent rigging hardware, we were able to make adjustments easily and get the desired results. Everything came together and we received numerous remarks that this was the best sound heard in the venue to date."
As with the Soca Royale and the Calypso Finals, the Cohoblopot event also relied upon D.A.S. Audio Aero 50 line arrays and LX-218 subwoofers. Again, the QSI team set up a system consisting of 16 Aero 50s-eight modules per side-accompanied by sixteen LX-218 subwoofers positioned eight enclosures per side.
For the ‘10 to 10' show, which took place in a large parking lot, Estwick's crew used 16 D.A.S. Audio Aero 48 large format, 3-way line array elements-eight cabinets per side-accompanied by eight ST-218 subwoofers per side. The QSI team outfitted the ST-218 subwoofers with D.A.S. Audio's 18LX low frequency loudspeaker and performed equalization tweaks to each system. "In addition to being an excellent subwoofer," Estwick said, "these enclosures now have a lot of low end punch. I couldn't believe I was hearing our old ST-218s!"
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