OTTAWA, Ontario – The Ottawa Bluesfest has grown into the largest blues festival in Canada and the second largest in North America, annually attracting around 300,000 music fans. Each year, Electro-Voice, Dynacord and Midas equipment from Wall Sound, Inc. (Ottawa) ensures audio performance in keeping with the festival’s international stature. For the 2007 festival, Wall Sound debuted their upgraded EV XLC 127DVX line array system; for this year’s festival, their new EV XLD super-compact line array system made its debut on the River Stage.
Held in Ottawa’s LeBreton Flats Park, the festival encompasses music from many genres beyond the blues. This year’s diverse range of headline acts included James Taylor, Brian Wilson, Fergie, The Tragically Hip, Steely Dan, The Black Crowes, Wyclef Jean, Plain White T’s, Feist, Great Big Sea, Boz Scaggs, The Wailers, Three Days Grace, Donna Summer, and many more.
“Our upgraded XLC DVX rig made an impressive festival debut on the main stage last year,” says Matt Lamarche, general manager of Wall Sound. “There were a wide range of big-name artists on the main (Bank of America) stage again this year, and the XLC sounded great across the board. I was the system tech for this stage, and everyone was very happy — we received a lot of positive comments from the engineers. Everything was controlled with IRIS-Net; the XLC main and delay arrays were all time-aligned with the ground-stacked Xsubs, and everything worked seamlessly with minimal EQ’ing — it’s a fantastic-sounding system.
“This year, the XLD rig was new for the River Stage powered by TG amps,” Lamarche adds. “We just got the rig in June, and this was our second show with it. This was also controlled and monitored via IRIS-Net, and provided amazing performance from such a compact system for such a large stage; the coverage and intelligibility was excellent.”
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