For Lavigne's latest North American trek, in support of The Best Damn Album, Yakabuski and Orlando-based sound reinforcement provider LMG have chosen to return to an L-Acoustics V-Dosc and dV-Dosc loudspeaker system - this time supplementing the rig with the manufacturer's Kudo enclosures and new LA8 amplified controllers.
"We have 15 V-Dosc with three dV-Dosc down-speakers per side as mains, and then 10 Kudo a side as side- arrays," Yakabuski explains. "We've also gone back to using a centre sub cluster, which has proved very successful for me in the past. There are 12 subs in a single long array in the centre, with nothing at all left and right, and only one sub a side about 16ft off-centre to hold up two dV-Dosc that take care of front-fill requirements. My system engineer, Evan Hall, and I are also driving the whole system with L-Acoustics' new LA8 amps, which are controlled by LA Network Manager."
Yakabuski's choices were based as much on coverage as on overall sound quality. "I am finding more and more that the shapes of concert audiences are changing from 10 or 15 years ago," he says. "Even though we have a huge video wall behind the stage that has some fantastic content on it, and a pair of side screens that have the artist's face on it all night long, I find that the concertgoer will still buy a ticket at the side of the stage where they have no view of these screen elements long before they'll buy a ticket further back in the venue."
While the V-Dosc arrays handle most of the venue, this side coverage played a big role in adding the kudo arrays. "You have to cover a very wide amount of seats along the side, but you also have to cover a very tall swath as well. The bottom seats near the stage can sometimes be only 15 or 20ft from the downstage edge, while the top bowl of an arena may be 150ft away, so having the flexibility to put a huge J-curve in the array and to be able to adjust the horizontal coverage from 55 to 80 to 110 degrees was a big deciding factor in going with the Kudo boxes."
(Jim Evans)
