Due to simultaneous W8 commitments in St Georges Square, Glasgow - and the necessity to match each mid/high box with a low-end enclosure at the Dome - Cap Sound were required to sub-hire an additional 14 WSX subwoofers from the new Martin Wavefront inventory of London-based FX Music to fulfil their remit to the Ministry of Sound. Four separate arenas - ‘Smoove’, ‘World Dance’, ‘Rulin’ and ‘Ministry Of Sound’ - were set up, and among the world-class DJs involved were Judge Jules, Dave Pearce, Alex P and Brandon Block.
Capital Sound Hire were contracted to kit out Smoove and World Dance - filling the two massive, 9,000-capacity eight-pole Khyam tents with powerful Martin Wavefront stacks. Given the vagaries of noise containment within the overall Dome’s geosphere, the council brought in Jim Griffiths of acoustics consultants Symonds to take sound measurements on the sensitive sites around the peninsular at Tower Hamlets. The company followed a similar formula to last year, but in view of the restricted space within the 90m structures they preferred a straightforward front-projection approach, utilizing four stacks of Martin W8C/WSX left and right of the stage, with a similarly-configured time-aligned delay stack set 35m from stage, providing coverage of the remaining 25m-30m.
The speaker layout was identical in each room, with additional centre fills - comprising four W8CS/W2 combinations in each case - run off a separate aux input and introduced as required. A pair of Martin Audio Blackline H3s in each tent, controlled from a dedicated DX1 digital controller, provided each DJ with reference monitoring. In the World Dance Khyam, BSS Omnidrives were used to provide the time alignment, while correction was set using XTA DPA-226s in Smoove.
All the power was provided by Crown amplification, and while Ian Colville and Mark Jowett mixed the sound in World Dance from an Allen & Heath ML300 - where splits were sent to BBC Radio 1 for live broadcast - Perry Wetherall and Kevin Hooley engineered in Smoove, utilizing a Midas Venice.
(Ruth Rossington)
