The Liverpool based company has toured with NIN before and US-based FOH engineer Pete Keppler has also used them on a number of previous occasions for other artists including the last David Bowie European tour.
Keppler specified a JBL VerTec system, with Adlib's Tony Szabo as systems engineer & crew chief. In Manchester, they utilised 14 VT4889s with 14 VT4880A flown subs per side for the main hangs, and 16 VT4889s per side for the side hangs. The subs were powered from Adlib's new Labgruppen PLM14000 amplifiers, with onboard Lake processing. A centre cluster of six L-Acoustics dV-Dosc was positioned just in front of the stage, pointing almost directly downwards and used as fills for the front rows.
This enabled the ground-stacking to be kept straightforward. More emphasis went into subs, with a left/right stack of four high L-Acoustics S28 subs run from the LA8 amps (also with onboard DSP), plus two stacks of two SB28s, 16ft apart, downstage centre along the front of the stage. A two high dv-Dosc front-fill stack was positioned at the front corners of the stage for additional fill.
At the O2, the VerTec arrays were all increased to 16 elements to deal with the extra volume of the Arena, with two delay hangs of eight VT4889s added. This configuration is proving a great formula for the venue reports Szabo and is the same arrangement they used with the V-Dosc system they put in the O2 when touring with Bob Dylan recently.
The O2 delays were flown at 26m in height specifically to cover the upper bowl seating at the rear of the room, so the top bowl sounded as punchy and sharp as the floor. These were run from Labgruppen PLM10000 amps.
(Jim Evans)
