UK - When Yes Events’ Tom Chennells became the first customer for the TT+ Audio GTX line array back in the spring, it was precisely with shows such as the Waddesdon Manor summer concerts that he had in mind.
The Victorian venue - a French Renaissance-style château in Buckinghamshire - provided the perfect backdrop for four nights of concerts featuring various tribute acts. Yes Events provided not only the premium sound, but the complete technical infrastructure, including lighting, video, all rigging and staging, barriers, as well as booking the acts, in what was a total turnkey operation.
TT+ Audio is from the home of Italian loudspeaker giant RCF, with whom Chennells has enjoyed a long relationship.
When GTX, the flagship of the new brand, was demoed earlier in the year he recognised that the smaller GTX 10 would be the perfect replacement for his long-serving RCF TTL33-A. “[The system] was coming to the end of its natural life and we needed something that was a touring standard in a medium format. The efficiency of GTX is pretty phenomenal, completely appropriate for the kind of work we do and much louder than other premium systems in the medium format class,” he noted.
“When you have a double 10” with large 4” compression driver - which is designed and engineered from the ground up - it’s going to outperform pretty much everything else medium format.” Every component is designed specifically for that box, which seems to have a massive advantage over manufacturers who buy off-the-peg transducers and then build a box around it, he rationalised.
The GTX also required little in the way of correction or DSP. “When you plug it in it’s already 99 per cent of the way there, which saves a lot of time.”
Yes Events’ initial investment enables them to rig an event with 12 boxes per side, with 10 of the matched GTS29 (2 x 19”) subwoofers. But Tom Chennells is already planning to expand this inventory in the future.
Of the subs, he says, “Although the box isn’t any bigger than a double 18 enclosure, it outperforms our previous [RCF] TTS 56s, containing double 21s. We get loads of SPL from it, and it has tons of attack because it’s not such a big driver.”
Chennells was first exposed to GTX under demo in Italy - with just six GTX10s per side and four subs arranged centrally. “It completely refocused how much kit is required for certain shows; an event that would historically have needed 16 TTL33-A I could now comfortably be covered with 12x GTX10 with more headroom too. This all impacts on costs, particularly transport.”
And so to Waddesdon Manor, where audiences of several thousand enjoyed acts ranging from the ABBA Tribute Concert and Take That Experience to the Bootleg Beatles.
With the stage set up right in front of an important historical building, Yes Events were mindful to run the two sub stacks (three per side) in cardioid for rear rejection purposes. They supplemented this from their RCF inventory, providing six active HDL26 for lipfills - with the main PA run on the new XPS 16K four-channel DSP amplifiers, complete with purpose designed touring racks. “That amp is such a powerful platform, and we’ve got everything networked through RDNet [RCF’s management network and control platform].” The deployment was completed with 12 TT25-CXA for artist monitoring and TT52 as shout speakers between FOH and monitor world.
RDNet has now become an essential part of Yes Event’s toolkit. “Over five generations it has moved from originally being a nice thing to have, to becoming a necessity, with more and more useful set-up tools. Systems that don’t have the ability to control or monitor speakers live today are becoming antiquated and RCF were ahead of the curve in that respect; RDNet now has the ability to tune and optimise systems built into the platform.”
One final plus point, according to Chennells, is the improved rigging. “A lot of thought has obviously been put into this - the angles are able to be pre-set straight off the dollies. The flybars have also been really well thought through … all the things that make it much easier to deploy.”
At Waddesdon, because of the directivity of the system and excellent cardioid rear rejection, Yes were able to achieve good level right across the audience staying well within licensable levels offsite. Bands’ engineers were also happy at the FOH position. “With such an extremely capable system there was always lots of dynamic headroom, and guest engineers had nothing but good comments.”
In conclusion, Tom Chennells said: “We’ve done some AB shoot outs with other systems in venues recently - GTX knocks the socks off them musically and people have been blown away by the coverage and output. Hopefully we can assist establishing TT+ audio as an industry standard product. It really does have the performance and finesse - a properly well thought out range of products.”
