Chris Beale, group technical director, SSE Hire, whose responsibilities include designing the systems configurations for all of the PAs that the company ships out, is enthusiastic about the performance of the 5000 Series: "We have encountered no negatives with the Audio-Technica kit, it's been very impressive in use throughout the various festival stages. We've been working with systems out on the Summer Sanatorium tour with Slipknot and considering the battering the kit has received on that, it's performed faultlessly.
"Everybody really likes the band planning software. Band planning is often seen as a something of a black art and the software really helps out, enables much easier addition of channels and removes the need for spreadsheets and calculators. It's another problem you have to deal with on the road that the AT system solves elegantly. They are very well built and well configured for road use and very capable."
Having used the 5000 series on all of the principal stages at the Download Festival at Donnington, SSE deployed eight channels at Glastonbury and at T In The Park, Scotland. Commenting on the success at Glastonbury, Beale says, "Many people bring their own RF systems - including Slipknot who brought their own Audio-Technica system to Donnington - but those who did not seemed happy to use the 5000 series. The mics are generally well liked by the engineers for their sound, which is fairly impressive when you're in a market where there exists such a widely accepted default. The fact that there were no issues with the 5000 series means we are talking about a very good product indeed. "We will buy more AT because it fits the bill in such a wide range of circumstances. It's definitely a progression in terms of facilities from the RF products we have been offering to date."
(Lee Baldock)
