RALEIGH, NC — The North Carolina State Fair produces nightly concerts featuring country, bluegrass, contemporary Christian and, more recently, R&B/hip-hop and southern rock bands, and one of the principal challenges for integrator RMB Audio is getting the best possible audio quality in a venue originally designed for rodeos, circuses and livestock exhibitions. Made of concrete, glass and steel, the fairground's Dorton Arena was built in 1952 and has been renovated several times since then, but it is still not the optimum site for concerts.
This year, RMB technicians Roger Dennis (FOH) and Robert Weddings (MON and logistics) used Martin Audio Viewpoint room modeling software and SMAART audio analysis software to come up with the system setup.
According to RMB's Cooper Cannady, "The main hang consisted of 11 W8LCs and one W8LCD left and right, and 8 W8LMs with 2 WLMDs hard left and right stage for outfills. Lip fills for the first rows were handled by W8LCs stacked on the subs at the corners of the stage."
The rest of the FOH setup consisted of a Midas Heritage 2000 console; Chevin Research and Lab.Gruppen amplification; a Klark-Teknik DN-370 Stereo 1/3 Octave EQ and FDS-388 OMNIDRIVE; Drawmer limiting and noise gates; an Eventide H3000; TC Electronic D-2 Delay and a Yamaha SPX-990 multi-effect system. A Midas XL-88 matrix mixer was set up to allow the FOH console outputs from visiting audio engineers to interface with the seven sends required for the house speaker system. For monitoring, RMB used 14 Martin Audio LE700 biamped wedges for stage monitoring, along with two W8/W8S enclosures as sidefills.
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