With this major trade exhibition and public air shows running throughout the week, the Farnborough Airshow hosts over 100,000 people who travel to see everything from the mammoth 440-passenger Airbus to the Red Arrows. The tradeshow element of the Airshow included 1500 exhibitors, 73,000 trade visits and $124 billion worth of orders and commitments.
Two years ago, QSC's Q-Sys audio networking system controlled the PA/VA at the show. For 2016, the Shure Systems Group UK worked with Show Hire to provide a more extensive Q-Sys network with more QSC infrastructure throughout the event, allowing the organisers to control every audio element required at the massive show.
Show Hire events manager Ross Slaughter provided a touchscreen-driven GUI in the Show Control office that delivered fingertip control of the 30 separate zones across the site, powered by two Q-Sys 500i Integrated Core processors with 11 I/O Frames. This allowed the event controllers to touch a zone, select a message, set up background music, route emergency services or general message paging, or select commentary.
This year, QSC CXD4.5Q and PL380 amplifiers were added, networked through Q-Sys and powering 120 speaker stacks on the flight path and 20 stacks for public announcements throughout the site, in addition to hundreds of speakers in the four trade show halls.
Show Hire MD Nick Chubb comments, "The addition of Q-Sys-networked amps provided invaluable remote status and monitoring information. It was very reassuring to know that we would be alerted to any faults or problems occurring across the site and could be proactive in solving them."
Shure Systems Group's John Ellis adds, "Show Hire has made a major investment in Q-Sys and are doing some very impressive work with the system. In addition to Farnborough, it has been used at the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials and the Badminton Horse Trials, which means they have been contracted for the three largest outdoor events in Europe this year. It is very exciting to work with a company who is using Q-Sys in such innovative ways and really stretching the capabilities of the platform."
(Jim Evans)
