This international festival, first held in 1958 and now one of the most important summer cultural events in Catalonia, has seen a high-quality and eclectic programme of performers throughout July and August. In its picturesque location beside Sant Feliu's town harbour, the purpose-built stage has hosted local and international artists such as Belle & Sebastian, Silvia Perez Cruz and Raul Fernandez, the Crystal Fighters and American jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater.
For the 12 live concerts of the festival, BTM installed a Nexo STM Series concert sound system featuring the new M28 main line array cabinets with S118 sub bass. Just six main cabinets per side, with six subs on the ground, were deployed for the 1300-capacity auditorium, running on a Dante network with a Yamaha CL5 console at front-of-house.
Girona-based BTM Sound has been a Nexo house for more than 20 years, starting with Alpha and adding Geo S8, Geo T and Geo D line arrays to its inventory over the years. STM Series was a natural step for BTM, which is also the main audio supplier to Barcelona's famous Palau de la Musica.
"The relationship of power to system hardware is just incredible," explains system designer Raimon Jaramillo from BTM. "With the itinerary of this festival, we have bands of many different genres, from acoustic guitar and vocal, to jazz, to comedians, to indie rock. All the visiting engineers have been very positive about the STM's performance, which has been set up in exactly the same way for every show - flat! - and has required very little tweaking."
Jaramillo and his team have used SMAART and Nexo's proprietary modelling software package NS-1 to configure the system. This included the positioning of the S118 subs, which are set up in omni mode, and equally spaced 2m apart in front of the stage. "It sounds perfect," says Jaramillo, "we have 100dB at FOH with plenty of headroom, and amazingly the whole system, including cables, has a transportation weight of just 1.5 tonnes."
Nexo's distributor in Spain is Doscientos Viente Sonido (220), which has itself invested in a STM M28 system, including STM B112 bass cabinets. "It is small in size but excellent in operation," says 220 owner Jose Maria Mendez. "The secret weapon of the system is the NUAR or Nexo Universal Amp Rack which is compact but contains lots of tools. It offers particularly effective network functionality, especially over Dante with the Yamaha consoles. Everything has been designed to work together."
(Jim Evans)
