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ESL Ventures into Vieta Land
Situated at Southend-on-Sea’s Western Esplanade, Adventure Island, is a 40-acre leisure site packed with fun park rides, experiences and restaurants.
Having provided sound reinforcement earlier in the year for the restaurants and bumper car rides, Mike Glover’s locally-based Essex Sound & Light were called in again when Adventure Island owners Stockvale decided to launch a new weekend carnival parade titled Light Fantastic. Designed specifically for the Autumn and Winter season, they wanted a potent sound system which would envelope spectators, to complement the new illuminations.
After purpose designing the structure for the new illuminations, Robert Roberts, general manager of Adventure Island, tasked ESL with matching the catenary effect of the festooned lighting by fixing discreet loudspeakers to the custom-designed lamp post-style poles — spaced equidistantly along the procession route. Within this purpose design, Roberts had allowed for his own mounting brackets and cable termination points for fixing transducers, and cable management.
It was Vieta’s UK distributors, Resolution Distribution, who alerted ESL to the Spanish company’s elegant weatherproof DO-44, which can be low- or high-impedance operated. This proved the ideal soluton.
In conjunction with Resolution Distribution’s Andy Austin-Brown, Mike Glover designed a system based around 36 of Vieta’s IP-rated DO-44 4 x 4in loudspeaker enclosures. These are installed as a 100v line system, utilising Vieta purpose wound transformers and driven by two Lab-Gruppen C68 4-channel amplifiers.
Sources can be selected between HD delivery, multiple CD players and a high quality microphone input, controlled and relayed to eight zones via a Cloud Electronics zoner.
“Adventure Island essentially uses HD delivery for the Friday procession, although they are running this music site-wide, using Scheduling software,” notes Glover.
“The DO-44’s have proved absolutely ideal and a very cost-effective solution. From the visitor’s point of view it means that wherever they stand, they are constantly on axis rather than drifting in and out of the sound field.” This is important, he says, given the high ambient noise levels created by the screams from the fun rides, and the high winds blowing off the sea.
In fact Mike Glover admits to being pleasantly surprised at the quality and coverage achieved, with perfect directionality, stating that it is the best 100v line system he has heard.
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