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Dylan Plays London Fleadh With Nexo Geo T
The legendary Bob Dylan has made a rare outdoor appearance, in front of 30,000 fans, at the Finsbury Park Fleadh. This one-day festival was the only London appearance for the founding father of folk-rock, the headline act on a bill that included The Charlatans and The Counting Crows.
A Nexo GEO T tangent-array system was provided by SSE Hire for the event, with Midas front-of-house control for all the engineers except Pablo Wheeler, who brought in a DiGiCo digital board to mix Dylan. The SSE team set up left and right arrays of 20 Geo T4805 with 2 T2815, and 24 Nexo CD18 sub-bass units, all powered by Camco Vortex 6 amplifiers. For the first time, the system used Nexo's new NX242 TDcontrollers, digital management systems which carry the latest processing software for GEO, currently being beta-tested by SSE.
"The new software offers significant performance improvements," said SSE Director Chris Beale. "Since the launch of GEO, we've learnt a lot about the intricacies of processing line arrays with cardioid attributes. I am extremely pleased with the performance of the system with these new parametrics: the resolution of the system, particularly in the high frequencies is massively improved, and the low midrange is much better resolved. We now have more headroom and better performance, especially with the longer array lengths."
A week following the London Fleadh, SSE took the GEO T system down to the Glastonbury Festival for use on the primary Pyramid Stage. Here, the set-up used arrays of 26 T-cabinets, with auxiliary out-fill hangs of 12 cabinets each, and delays at 160 metres. "It worked perfectly," according to Beale.
"On flat sites, the longer the line array the smaller the inter-cabinet angle becomes (for a given rigging height) and the greater the low midrange coupling effect. We would rather rig the arrays at a greater height (and hence more curved) but unfortunately the promoters don’t like paying for 30m tall structures! The increase in coupling and the effects of HF absorption means one has to be very careful about filtering, so we've taken this very much into account in the processing algorithm.
"A useful rule-of-thumb is that, on a flat site or in an arena, one GEO T cabinet is required to cover five metres of arena depth, in other words, to cover a 100 metre site from front to back would take 20 cabinets. After 150 metres, the HF absorption relative to the amount of full-range output is marginal; that's when you need delays. It's easy to see that 30 cabinets is a logical maximum array length because, well beyond 150 metres, you're never going to have enough HF regardless of the type of line array used.
"The new processing software has been optimised in the realistic operational field up to 150m range. The result is that the GEO T is extremely comfortable to use within these physical boundaries and easy to extend beyond them, providing one accepts the physical constraints of HF losses."
5th July 2004
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