With over 60,000 music fans attending, the 2015 event was the largest to date. For the first time, Clockenflap invited French loudspeaker manufacturer Nexo to be the festival's audio partner, a huge undertaking which meant supplying PA systems to seven separate performance stages (monitoring included) as well as a number of lounges, VIP areas and band common rooms.
The festival was the ideal showcase for Nexo's modular line array system, the STM Series, allowing the four-module system to be configured in four different ways to suit the main PA requirements of four different principal stages. With nearly 500 Nexo cabinets on site, the powerful mix-and-match capabilities of the company's relatively small range of products was shown off to the full - STM Series modules used as stage-fill, compact Geo M6 cabinets used as in-fill with the larger STM system, RS Subs deployed alongside the STM S118 subs.
The Harbourflap is the main performance stage - spectacularly located at the waterside with its view of Hong Kong Island's skyline. Here Nexo's flagship STM rig could be heard in full flow. On stage left and right, arrays of 15x M46 main and 15x B112 bass modules plus one M28 down-fill below were flown alongside nine S118 subs, with a further 10x S118s cabinets groundstacked below. This covered a main audience area more than 100m deep.
On the second Atum Stage, a completely different STM proposition was in action - here the STM M28 omnipurpose module was used as the main cabinet in the PA arrays. "With 15x M28 each side, we covered an audience of 12-15,000," explains NEXO support engineer Val Gilbert. "This was the biggest show I've ever done with M28 as the main box, and even I was a bit concerned when I saw how compact the system looked. But all the engineers were absolutely stunned, they wouldn't believe that it was possible to get that kind of output from a 2x 8" cabinet."
For the third stage, the delicately named YourMum, just 6x M46/B112 cabinets per side were used, showing STM operating on a much smaller scale. And on the fourth stage, Electriq, four sets of STM main/bass modules were groundstacked each side on top of a wall of 12x S118 and 8xRS18 subs to provide a world-class dance tent system.
"What makes the Clockenflap event so interesting is its diversity of stage sizes and the different styles of music," says Val Gilbert. "It shows how the STM concept of scale through modularity works in practice."
This event was a major logistical task, as NEXO director Denis Baudier explains. "Our systems have been used at Clockenflap in the past, but this year, we became the exclusive supplier, deploying virtually every product in the Nexo range to match the varying PA locations. This was made possible by a tremendous collaboration between the engineering team of Top Plot International, Nexo's own distributor for China, the Hong Kong PA company GL Events, and regional Nexouser Showco from Singapore, together with the Engineering Support group from Nexo itself."
(Jim Evans)
