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JBL Touring Systems Heard by 50,000 at GlobalGathering Freedom Festival

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Pop singer Dima Bilan climbs on a truss in front of a JBL VERTEC VT4888DP-AN speaker array.

MINSK, Belarus —JBL touring systems teamed with rental sound company Touring Services to supply an expansive audio system for the Global Gathering Freedom Festival at the Borovaya Airfield that included products from JBL’s VerTec DP Series and HLA Series loudspeaker lines. Well-known DJs included Axwell, Steve Angello, Dubfire, Sebastien Leger, D. Ramirez, Menno De Jong, Micky Slim, Paul Thomas and Eston, and Tiesto was the headline act for the festival. Touring Services, a division of ART Studio Pro, handled audio production at the event, with Vladimir Klimenko in charge as the chief system engineer.

Due to the airfield location of the event, a very large crowd could be accommodated. Event organizers had originally planned for 15,000 people but were reportedly surprised when total pre-event ticket sales reached 36,000. Final onsite attendance was estimated at 50,000.

This year’s event included two main stages and a third, separate foam dance floor. Assembly of the stages and other support fixtures took place from June 24 to 27, with sound checks on June 27 as well, before the gates opened at 6 p.m. for the one-night event.

The Freedom Stage featured JBL VerTec DP Series arrays, suspended from construction cranes. A total of 24 VT4888DP-AN midsize powered line array elements, equipped with JBL DrivePack technology, were supported by 12 VT4880A full-size arrayable subwoofers driven by Crown I-Tech 8000 amplifiers.

“It’s a real pleasure to work with JBL’s VerTec DP systems,” said Roman Klimenko, sound engineer in charge of the Freedom Stage. “We recently updated the entire system with JBL’s new V4 DSP presets. Everything is simple, loud and clear. Plus, Harman’s HiQnet is truly amazing. Any configuration that we had to do was accomplished within the networked JBL DrivePack units, quickly and easily.”

The Global Stage was served by a JBL HLA system, with 24 4895 full-range elements and 12 4897A bass modules driven with BSS 366 OmniDrive signal processing and Crown MA-5000 series amplifiers.

The Touring Services sound crew had several challenges to meet, including the co-location of two different competing stages, and proximity of the crowd to the loudspeakers at the Freedom Stage site.

“The task was to set up the two sound systems so as not to interfere each other. For this, we calculated appropriate signal delay settings, using Harman’s HiQnet System Architect software for aligning signals in the Crown I-Tech amplifiers for both stages,” noted Vladimir Klimenko.

“At the Freedom Stage, our task was to provide a comfortable listening zone for the front audience areas, and a very loud, high-quality sound for the back rows,” Klimenko added. “For this we first calculated all the array settings and site characteristics using JBL’s Line Array Calculator software and we were able to achieve a nearly flat frequency response for distances from directly below the loudspeaker arrays, out to 115 meters,” or about 377 feet.

Due to the character of the recorded sound material, with tracks that were well-balanced and highly compressed for maximum dance-music impact, the Touring Services crew found that they were able to give the DJs and visiting engineers what Klimenko called “99.99 percent” of the total SPL capabilities of the systems, without the need to have additional, significant headroom.

“The systems were operated hard like this for 12 hours straight without any problems,” Vladimir Klimenko said. “All in all, we were proud to be involved in such a large, significant event as the Global Gathering Freedom Festival. It was a good test for our equipment and for our personnel’s skills. And I can declare with conviction that both the equipment and our staff coped with all the challenges, achieving a great success. We wanted to make the earth tremble at this festival, and we did.”

For more information, please visit www.jblpro.com.