As in 2007, the full width of the Earls Court arena was filled by a double stage, which allowed producers to flip-flop between live performances on the 'Glam' stage and the 'Punk' stage, with the presenters Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne in the centre. According to Zieba, the show turned out to be "my best BRITs ever; we delivered an event for everyone, and still managed to develop a real stage show for each artist from Mika who opened the evening, to Sir Paul McCartney who closed it." Award winners ranged from the Foo Fighters and Kylie Minogue taking the International gongs, to the Arctic Monkeys and Take That from the UK.
Last year's EV X-Line PA system generated such a positive reaction that Zieba repeated the design for the 2008 show. However, one international newcomer was making its debut appearance - EV's new NetMax digital matrix system, added into the system for extra control. "The whole system is mastered through IRIS-Net control and supervision software," explains Zieba. "However, NetMax helped us enormously by giving us accurate and recallable control of all the smaller speakers, allowing us to insert EQ and delay, and meter the results. It gave us the same level of control over the rest of the system that IRIS gave us over the main PA."
Although there were two stages, there was just one main sound system. Left and right of the large 70m stage set were hangs of Electro-Voice X-Line mid-top cabinets and subs. The stage system was completed by a centre hang with six small cabinets squashed into a tiny space below the follow-spots. Zieba balanced levels and delay to give a stereo image in the centre of the arena. The substantial delay system operated as a duplicate of the front system. With a L/R/L arrangement on the hangs, each with eight EV XLS cabinets, the front-of-house engineers used the two delay hangs in front of them as their reference.
"The EV X-Line system has developed into an extraordinarily good PA for rock 'n' roll," says Zieba, although he has another more subtle motive for choosing it. "With other manufacturers choosing to build smaller boxes, X-Line is attractive for its large form factor size. We only have an hour with each band, and I don't want to spend that time persuading them that the PA can deliver their performance. It's a psycho-acoustic thing, but one that I have to take into account - the sound system has got to look the part."
(Jim Evans)
