Gearhouse was again working for The Shalom Trust, and in close collaboration with its technical co-ordinator, Nik Fairclough of Northwind Recording who also mixed the FOH sound.
Gearhouse's project manager was Eyal Yehezkely. He oversaw a crew of 28, spanning multiple technical disciplines - audio, AV and screens, power, lighting and staging. The project management included internal and on site logistics, surveying and GPS mapping of the site, detailed layouts, design of the crowd seating, positioning of delay towers and structures and producing comprehensive site plans.
The primary technical challenge - with an expected audience of up to 400,000 - was to ensure that all could clearly see and hear what was happening onstage from wherever they were sitting. The stage and site layout was completely different from last year, with an 'end on' stage and a wide amphitheatre created for the audience, radiating outwards at 170 degrees from the stage in a trapezoidal shape.
With the most distant crowd members potentially 470m from the stage and a 162,000sq.m audience area to cover, a comprehensive network of sound and daylight video screen delays was necessary.
Screens were provided by Gearhouse's screen specialist company, LEDVision, whose Allen Evans proposed using portrait format screens to fully maximise the available viewing space. This highly efficient IMAG concept worked perfectly for the IMAG relay of Angus Buchan's speeches that were the main focus of the 3 day event.
LEDVision provided a total 278 Lighthouse R16 LED panels that were configured onstage as three striking 5 x 10 panel surfaces, each measuring 5.08m x 7.62m (39m2).
While spoken words took precedence for the weekend, additional entertainment was from The Worship Band so the PA system was designed by L'Acoustics CVE Tom Gordon to meet multiple criteria:
Gordon used L-Acoustics Soundvision acoustic modeling software to calculate the optimum system needed to cover the arena, which he finds extremely accurate - provided the venue data is also spot on.
A total of 120 L-Acoustics line-array cabinets and 36 subs were supplied by Gearhouse Audio. The main stage left and right hangs comprised 14 V-Dosc elements per side for the main system with a secondary hang of nine L'Acoustics Kudo's per side for out-fills. Four dV-Doscs positioned along the lip of the stage acted as front-fills.
The nine delay towers were arranged in a continuous inner ring of five and a broken outer ring of four. The inner ring was based around two main arrays of 10 V-Dosc; with a central array of 6 Kudos, and far left and right arrays of 9 dV-Dosc completing the ring.
Dolby Lake processors were at the heart of the audio control system. These were fed with separate main stereo and sub-bass signals from the FOH console and acted as a master EQ station as well as a matrix mixer/signal distribution unit for the main system.
FOH was mixed by Nik Fairclough on a Yamaha PM5DRHV2 which he ran complete with a selection of analogue outboards.
The Gearhouse Power team was led by Ronnie Malatji. They provided two 300KVA synched generators for audio and LED screens, two 100 KVA synched sets for lighting - a combination of PARs, 2K fresnels and i-Pix Satellites were used for a good white light TV ambience - and two 60KVA generators for the far outer audio delays and LED screens.
The power distribution layout was designed by Antony Sackstein, Tom Gordon and Allen Evans, with particular attention paid to ensuring a stable voltage over the long cable runs.
The stage was designed to give the maximum visibility for all the viewing angles in the natural amphitheatre that was made up of the farm's fields and natural terrain. An open b
