MANCHESTER, ENGLAND – ADLIB Audio & Lighting supplied equipment for the high-profile Versus Cancer show at Manchester Evening News Arena. The lineup included nine leading artists including The Enemy, The Fratellis, Happy Mondays, Fun Loving Criminals, Athlete, The View, Inspiral Carpets, The Farm and the XFM winners All Bar 3.
ADLIB's new V-DOSC system was utilized for the PA, with front hangs of 12 V-DOSC per side, complete with four dV-DOSCs per side for downfills and side hangs of 12 dV-DOSCs elements. For front fills, they used eight ARCs cabinets.
The subs totalled 16 of the new high-powered L-ACOUSTICS SB28s and eight SB218s – all ground stacked. The front hangs and subs were driven by the new LA8 amps, with the side hangs and fills powered by Lab.gruppen, complete with ADLIB's speaker cabling and infrastructure to make it work.
At front of house, they provided two Soundcraft Vi6 digital consoles, which were set up festival style as A & B systems and flip-flopped for the nine bands, all of whom received exactly the same facilities via the onboard dynamics and effects. ADLIB’s Vi6's have just been upgraded to Optocore fibre multicores.
Both FOH desks were babysat by Dave Kay, and the system was looked after by ADLIB's Tony Szabo. Most of the bands also brought their own engineers, and any that didn’t were mixed by Kay.
The system was driven by five Dolby Lake Processors, one of which was set up as a matrix input switcher for the consoles to keep the signal digital all the way from the console to the outputs. Szabo also used a Meyer SIM3 to align the system and aide with the system tuning.
In monitor world, ADLIB's Marc Peers also approached the gig as a high intensity festival situation. The 10 minute changeovers allowed absolutely no margin for error "so the prep really had to be rock solid" he explains.
Hardware wise, they supplied a total of 18 ADLIB MP3 wedges, flown NEXO Alpha sidefills all run from Crown amplifiers and two Yamaha PM5D consoles – also run in 'flip-flop' mode with no outboard equipment. The PM5D monitor consoles were manned by Ben Booker and Richy Nicholson.
Due to quick changeovers, there was an unusually large inventory of mics – Shure, Sennheiser, AKG and Beyer – stands and cabling in order to leave as much as possible set up after sound check. The smooth running of the show was greatly aided by those "unsung heroes at the sharp end" says Peers referring to the mics and stage cables team of Walter Jaquiss, Declan Fyans and Laura Davis.
For more information please go to www.adlibaudio.co.uk
