French rental company Melpomen has provided the audio kit for Hellfest since its inception in 2006, and, as Melpo has been a big Nexo user for nearly 20 years, the festival has always been Nexo-centric. With STM onboard this year, that meant more headroom and more control than ever before, according to Thierry Tranchant, Melpo's president.
"We have a very good relationship with the festival organisers, so when we explained that we needed STM because it is such a fantastic, powerful system, and it's so easy to rig, they just took our word for it," he says, backstage during day one of the event.
"We've designed it so that the maximum level of the system is 118dB, so we have a serious amount of headroom to play with." And evidently so: the headliners were coming through loud and clear at just 104dB from FOH -some 55m back from the stage. Tranchant says the throw from stage was actually 70m to the end of the audience area.
"We've always had a great sound from GEO-T at Hellfest, but I have to say working with STM is quite a step up. Sonically, the HF and the mid frequencies are just perfect, and we now have an extremely solid and powerful low-end," Tranchant insists. "The additional power, in fact, is so evident that we only need to use two-thirds of the amount of STM cabinets in comparison to what we would need if we were using GEO - that is really impressive."
As is tradition at Hellfest, there are two main stages located next to each other and the bands 'flip-flop' between the two to ensure that the festival soundtrack is uninterrupted. "There is no silence at Hellfest," jokes Tranchant. The two PA systems effectively run as one, continuously. When a band was playing on main stage A, the B stage system dropped 6dB in level, and vice versa.
Both stages were equipped with identical STM systems which were set up to run on 180Hz (Bass to Main) and 60Hz (S118 Subbass to B112 Bass) crossover frequencies. Each stage had a dedicated L/R main hang of 15x STM M46 Main Modules and 15x STM B112 Bass Modules per side; and two stacks of 15x S118 Sub Modules in a cardioid configuration on the floor. This totalled 180x sets of STM.
Amplification was handled by 20x units of Nexo Universal Amp Racks, each containing two NXAMP 4x4s, which Tranchant says are some of the best he's ever worked with.
"The power the NXAMPs give out is more than enough, and in terms of reliability, they're absolutely perfect," he says. "Also, the NXAMP's power supply is particularly clean and there's no pickup consumption like you often see in many other amplifiers, so it's really a very efficient product."
Melpomen's team was led by crew chief David Prevost, with Cedric Bernard and Christophe Rousseau supervising FOH on Main Stage 1, and Samuel Biraies and Wilfrid Hubert on Main Stage 2.
(Jim Evans)
