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tube uk gets Festive

UK – Manchester-based audio specialist tube uk dipped into its vast stock of event equipment to service eight special nationwide Christmas trail installations over the festive period that were produced and curated by art and live experience afficionados, Culture Creative Ltd (CCL), in partnership with Raymond Gubbay, a division of Sony Music.

The trails were in different locations up and down the UK in a variety of cool nature-related settings including Bedgebury National Pinetum and Forest, Leeds Castle in Kent, Wimpole Estate near Cambridge, Stourhead in Wiltshire, Chester Zoo and Dunham Massey, plus the flagship trail in Kew Gardens.

Each trail involved between 15 and 28 separate sonic installations – 156 in total – which were essential to enhancing the mood, atmosphere and magic, together with stunning lighting and SFX. The sound installations ranged in length from a compact 25 metres to as long as 400 metres, so ‘flexibility’ of the chosen kit was high on the agenda after ‘make everything sound fantastic’!

The soundscape sources – typically a standard looped audio track – were all running on classic Sony Walkman audio players of which tube uk has 208. Over several years of outdoor trail experience and experimentation, these have proved simple, reliable and effective for this application.

tube uk has 2,054 JBL Control 1 speakers in stock, which are a default for ‘trail’ installations, “small and solid sounding is the way to go,” says tube uk’s Melvyn Coote.

The Control 1s were driven by SubZero PAD800 amps of which tube has 176, plus 12 PAD600s and there was also 95 Behringer NX1000 amps on the different sites.

Most of tube uk’s 249 Yamaha MG06 mixers were deployed across the installations which consumed approximately 38 kilometres of YY speaker cabling. There are usually around 3,000 of these cables in the warehouse in varying lengths from even to 50 metres together with around 5,000 metres of 100m and 50m NL4 speaker cables, plus another 500 NL4 cables of ‘normal’ length.

The 2024-25 Christmas trails project consumed around 80% of tube’s specific inventory for these kinds of shows, and all of this planning required some nifty number crunching!

This kit has grown and the systems refined over recent years with an amount of testing and experimentation leading to a go-to specification for good, cost-effective audio solutions for the ever-popular trail sector, developed and optimised to work in the most demanding environments.

They are robust enough to stand up to the English winter weather while sounding fantastic for the hundreds of thousands hitting the winter trails each season.

Once the different trail’s creative and content elements have been conceived by CCL’s managing director Zoe Bottrell and her team, Melvyn and tube come in to discuss audio requirements for each individual installation. They assess speaker placement and whether these need to be both sides or a single side of paths and walkways, together with the volumetric areas needing to be covered in any of the open or gathering spaces.

Usually, speakers will be positioned every eight to ten metres apart, but some can be spaced up to 15 metres.

The main challenges for this project were the sheer amount of kit needed, the logistics entailed in prepping and installing 156 different systems in a simultaneous period all over the UK and naturally, once on site, the weather is always the biggest issue, coupled with winter’s short daylight hours.

Despite 2024 year being generally drier than previously, some sites were badly battered by Storm Bert which wreaked metrological havoc across much of the UK and Ireland in late November, its effect temporarily closing down several trails due to high winds and torrential rain.

In addition to the sound systems, tube also has the crewing detail down to a fine art.

Three people – one experienced technician plus two others – installed the majority of the sites in three to five days. Kew was rigged by two people over a 14-day period and tube now has five chief engineers who are very competent leading a team to install each site.

Get-outs can also be galvanising, as they all have to be completed in one or two days or ‘ASAP’ around the same time within the first few days of January.

“And a few words of praise for our fantastic warehouse crew,” adds Melvyn, “who get landed with the gargantuan task of drying out, cleaning up, de-humidifying, testing and restoring the kit to full working order after several weeks of harsh outdoor labour: that is a lot of work!”

He notes that with all the kit back in the warehouse and sorted, it will – together with tube uk’s crew – soon be getting ready for more immersive adventures in the spring / summer of 2025.

photos: Kat Gollock and Geraint Lewis

13th February 2025

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