Britannia Row Productions' Johnny Keirle was systems tech for the event and, despite arriving in the UK from New Zealand recently, has seen plenty of Flashline action. "I'm pretty familiar with Turbosound as I worked a lot with Oceania back in New Zealand, they have a large Flashlight and Floodlight rig that's one of the best sounding systems around. The very first time I heard Flashline, I loved it. Since then, the more I work with Flashline the more I like it," he says.
"Mechanically, the rigging is very well thought out. The flying and angling system is very thoughtfully laid out and labeled, making it easy and straightforward to put in the air. With four boxes to a dolly you can set the majority of angles on the ground, resulting in a quick and easy flying process. The flybar case is a clever design and it's tidy and compact. Flashline is extremely easy to put in the air and equally importantly, very easy to land after a long day's work."
For the Pepsi Max Stage - which measured about 100m by 50m wide - Turbosound's latest large scale line array system consisted of 10 TFS-900H high packs flown per side, with six each TFS-900B subs at left and right, plus a centre stack of six TFS-900Bs. Extra subs were added to the original specification in order to beef up the sub-bass frequencies for will.i.am and the festival's hugely popular and predominantly electronic-based hip-hop, RnB and rap artist line-up.
An EASE Focus plot run on the morning of the festival set up day helped to determine the optimum inter-box angles, which were then implemented while still on the dollies. "It takes only five or ten minutes to go through the configuration to make sure it's going to look good, and once you've got them in the air you can trim levels accordingly from the amp racks," explains Keirle. "We can do that because of the way the racks are configured.
"I'm running the top three cabinets on one amplifier channel, the next three on one channel, and the bottom four as two pairs. This way we have a lot of control over the directivity of the array - such as trimming the lower cabinets back quite a bit at the bottom to hit the first 30 metres, and as it's around 100 metres to the back we're going to push the tops to achieve that long throw. There are no delays at all, which is great from the audience's point of view."
Flex Array TFA-600H three-way mid/high in-fills positioned just in front of the side-fills covered the front audience area. "We have this curved crowd barrier and those cabinets cover the centre really nicely, and then we have a couple more Flex Array boxes at the outside to cover the flanks," says Keirle.
Low end was provided by a total of 18 TFA-900B subwoofers, ground stacked three high by two wide at left and right, and a centre block two high by three wide which was phase aligned appropriately to break up the power alley/power valley complications frequently encountered with widely spaced traditional left/right sub configurations. "The subs were great in the room," he says. "We had very even coverage for the majority of the space and easily reached the back of the tent. In fact I was running the subs at -6dB over the weekend; we had plenty of headroom there."
According to Keirle, the coverage of the flown Flashline boxes was exceptional. "We weren't dealing with a huge amount of boxes but achieved a great result," he says.
The Britannia Row crew for the Pepsi Max stage at Wireless were Craig Ross (FOH), Alex Hore (monitors), Johnny Keirle (systems / stage technician), Hector Rivera and Danilo Z (stage technicians),
