Leading figures from the worlds of literature, music and the arts attract 50,000 visitors from all over the UK, Europe and America for 10 days a year, to join in what festival director Peter Florence calls ‘a market of ideas’. The music programme included Macy Gray, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Afro Celt Sound System and Bob Geldof, while new ideas and writing were presented by Maya Angelou, Paolo Coelho, Ian McEwan, Michael Ignatieff, Edna O'Brien, Sebastian Faulks, Louis de Bernieres and Hari Kunzru, among others.
In the main arena, a marquee with theatre-style seating for 1,200, Stage Electrics was brought in to provide a dual-purpose audio system capable of coping with daytime readings and lectures from a lectern, switching in the evenings to a full-blown music PA catering for the eclectic lineup of bands.
Making the complex changeovers simple at the end of every afternoon was an XTA Electronics control system comprising DP226 and DP224 digital loudspeaker processors, a laptop PC with a wireless card and a touchscreen PC running a wireless LAN and XTA AudioCore software. A pair of DP324 SiDD dynamics processors on inserts provided compression for keyboards and DJ sets, plus delay, gating and parametric EQ, while engineer Sean Busby-Little brought in another two SiDDs for Bob Geldof. The PA consisted of left/right stacks of six EAW KF695s with eight SB330 subwoofers understage; a pair of JF260 cabinets for seating fills either side of the stage thrust and four KF300s as centre fills and delays, all driven by Lab Gruppen amplification. A six-way Sennheiser 3000 Series radio system and an AKG lectern mic served for questions from the floor, while bands were provided for by Shure and AKG mics.
Sound operator Simon Kenning oversaw the speech presentations and discussions, while Stage Electrics’ Glenn Beckley and various guest engineers mixed the evening sessions, with Jamie Pryke mixing monitors on an Allen & Heath ML4000. Beckley designed the system with assistance from XTA’s Andrew Grayland, and says: "At one touch of button of our AudioCore system, the whole system could be reconfigured instantly into any one of three setups: testing mode, distributed speech setup, and a standard left/right amplified band setup." Two DP226s and a single DP224 were mounted in the amp racks, connected via an RS485 serial link on the house multicore to the PC at front of house. The latter was linked via wireless LAN to the handheld touchscreen remote for system setup. The ability to pre-set EQ, compression and delay settings in AudioCore, and instantly recall them on the night, removed the usual need to re-set every system parameter by hand.
Andrew Grayland is seeing more systems go over to wireless control: "Using radio links for system set-up and control is brilliant, especially in temporary venues, tents or festivals, where digging a multicore trench is not an easy option. The engineer then gets the chance to walk the venue, even when it is full, and adjust whatever he wants. We went to the Bob Geldof gig and loved it. Sean works the XTA SiDDs pretty hard on several bits of Bob’s show, but it really works well."
(Lee Baldock)
