At its official inauguration, attended by Belgium's prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, a huge live event was staged in the main television studio owned by Alfacam. Live HDTV feeds were set up all over the world for musical performances by Belgian rock group Novastar and percussion artist Meloritmo. The highlight of the TV show, which was broadcast live on HD1, Euro1080's HDTV channel, was a performance by Jean-Michel Jarre.
PA provider EML Productions, which recently embarked on a programme to replace all the processors in its inventory with Apex Intelli-X speaker management systems, was using a large number of its new units to do the show, providing component alignment, EQ and system delay for the Adamson PA system.
Joost Machiels, EML account manager for the event, explains that the main PA was comprised of two clusters of eight Y-10 Adamson cabinets, with four EML Subs per side, used for the opening act Novastar, a well-known Belgian rock 'n' roll band. Jean-Michel Jarre's performance used a surround system, consisting of six clusters of Spektrix. "In each corner, we installed a cluster of four Spektrix and four Wave cabinets by Adamson. Each cluster was aligned with an EML Sub. The central cluster only had four Spektrix cabinets, but was repeated with a delay cluster of four Spektrix."
The whole PA system was driven with LAB amplifiers and Apex Intelli-Xs. "The Intelli-X is used for EQ and delaying of the system, as well as aligning components," continues Machiels, "and, of course if necessary, for protection of the system. As well as the Intelli-X, we used four Apex Intelli-Q units, as system EQ for the 8 clusters in total. Both these units are very user-friendly, and they can be combined and controlled easily as one system on the PC. Of course, the main reason why the Intelli-X is used is because of its outstanding audio quality."
The IX48 Intelli-X is a 24 bit/48kHz, single rack-space, four input, eight output equalizer and loudspeaker management system that provides all of the processing required between the mixer outputs and the amplifier inputs. Designed to handle all live and installed sound applications, the networkable Apex Intelli-X features very extensive parametric and graphic EQ, filtering, delay, and output limiting options simultaneously on all outputs, with flexible crossover and matrix configurations.
(Lee Baldock)
