PUR rocks the house with Harman
- Details
PUR has played multiple concerts at the arena since it opened in 2001, and Frank Müller of 8 Days a Week has been the systems engineer for all of them. One of the biggest challenges at Veltins is the lack of good options for deploying subwoofers. When PUR played the arena in 2014, Müller hung the subwoofers in a 40-cabinet cluster above the centre of the stage, which created weight and placement issues for the video and lighting deployments. To avoid those difficulties at this year’s show, Müller forwent a traditional subwoofer deployment and instead relied on the superior bass response of JBL VTX V25-II loudspeakers to cover most of the bottom end for the performance.
"If you set up a VTX V25 rig, and you use the preset where the bass is all the way open - with no cut at 60 or 80 HZ - you get an incredible amount of low end,” Müller said. “You can easily mix a show on just the V25 loudspeakers without missing any lows. The usual question I get from people who aren’t familiar with VTX is, 'Can you turn off the subs for a second so I can listen without them?' I tell them, 'There are no subs on - it's all coming from the loudspeakers.'”
PUR's setup featured a four-sided stage, which provided good viewing angles for everyone in the venue. Using wireless gear, the band members were able to move around the stage at will. To accommodate the unique stage setup, Müller explained that he designed the system coverage by essentially drawing a circle around the stage and dividing it by eight.
Müller’s design included 144 V25-II loudspeakers, deployed in eight hangs of 18. For front-fills, 16 VTX A12 loudspeakers and 24 S28 subwoofers were deployed in eight separate clusters, with two A12 stacked on top of three S28. The entire system was powered by Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers, and the monitor console was a Soundcraft Vi3000. Müller’s team used JBL HiQnet Performance Manager 2.4.1 software to configure, optimize and monitor the system.
"We used the combination of the subs and A12s as a separate front fill system,” Muller explained. “It's physically impossible for only 24 subs to fill an arena like that. So other than in the areas in front, all the bass came from the V25s."
(Jim Evans)
