latest news headlines
DPA Soundco Runs 'Perfect' Sound Systems At Roskilde
For 12 years, leading Danish PA company DPA Soundco has supplied many different sound reinforcement systems to the Roskilde Festival. This year, for the first time, DPA equipped the Arena Stage and Ballroom Stage with NEXO GEO T Series tangent arrays, which received unprecedented acclaim for their quality over a diverse range of performances, from the Scissor Sisters to the Royal Danish Opera and the best of world music.
DPA Soundco's system designer Gorm Jakobsen was responsible for PA on three of Roskilde's six stages this year, including the 11,000-capacity Arena Stage, the second largest, and the Ballroom stage, which hosted all the world music events.
Jakobsen has used a variety of sound systems in the huge tent that houses the Arena Stage, notably Turbosound's Floodlight and Flashlight and, last year, the JBL VerTec. "They all worked, although, of the three, the line array was the best design for the space. However, this year, we used GEO T for the first time, and it was absolutely perfect. I've never heard anything like it in this tent."
The system was set up with 14x T4805s and 2x T2815s in each of the left and right arrays. The 8 CD18 subbass units either side of the stage had to be positioned about 10 metres away from the speaker hangs, giving an additional benefit of powerful sub bass in the outer areas of the tent. "We didn't tune anything on the PA," says Jakobsen, who was baby-sitting the artists' engineers at the Midas Heritage 2000 FOH console. "We had flat EQ throughout, just a notch filter at about 3K. The only processor I used with the system was the new EQ station from TC Electronic.
"The Arena tent is about 60 metres deep, so it was quite a lot of boxes for the space. Because it is a rock 'n' roll stage, we wanted to have headroom in the system. I arrayed the top 6 boxes with 0.12° between them, and then made the 'banana' curve from there. Taking the high frequencies out on the top boxes by trimming the HF amplifier on half power meant that we were able to build up the low end and the mid-range, using the top boxes only for headroom – not a thing you'd normally do with a line array, but it worked spectacularly well."
For the much smaller and more intimate Ballroom Stage, DPA Soundco supplied another NEXO GEO T system, configured with 5x T4805s and 1x T2815 cabinets in each array. "I admit, we were really surprised at how perfectly it worked with so few cabinets," says Jacobsen. "Because it was the world music stage, the performers produced a lot of unusual instruments, a good test for the GEO T. The feedback we got was that this was the best-sounding of all the stages."
Jacobsen also remarks on the fact that many of the artists on his stages had appeared in the UK at the Glastonbury Festival in the previous week, where NEXO GEO T systems are used on the big Pyramid Stage. "According to the people we talked to, GEO T is a PA system that makes artists and engineers happy!"
11th August 2004
HEADLINES
news archive
search stories
FOOTNOTE: Select the news type you require in the red band above; this will enable you to see the current news stories from that section
© 1999 - 2012 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories
