Now called the Festival of Life, it has become a bi-annual occurrence and claims to be the biggest all night non-denominational gathering of people in Europe. The latest event was held at London's ExCel at the end of November and with attendance figures estimated at 32,000 meant that audio supplier Canegreen Commercial needed to provide a substantial amount of audio equipment with XTA digital signal processing delivering essential control.
The largest of the venue's auditoria, measuring 175m x 87m, was used as the site of the main gathering and accommodated 25,000 of the worshipers. Here Canegreen, via sub contractor Concert Sound, installed a total of 14 loudspeaker hangs comprising EAW KF760s and KF761's for the main left and right hangs, then a further six KF760s, nine hangs of six JBL 4889 VerTec, and two hangs of Sound Projects SP20 line array.
"For the main part of the system we used XTA DP428s which were processing sub, lo mid and hi on the main hangs and then running the two sets of front fills," explains FOH engineer Matthew Manasse. "Then we had four DP226s doing the lo mid high on the ground stacks of KF750 to cover the areas where the line array fell off, plus all the VerTech, the rear hangs of 760 and the Sound Projects loudspeakers."
With the variety of loudspeaker cabinets that were in place, careful set up was required to make sure that the audio was consistent for the entire length of the room and that time alignment was both sonically correct and in time with the video relay that was in place. Set up was via XTA's proprietary AudioCore software using a wireless tablet. "I got the front hangs of KF760s how I wanted them to sound and then matched the rest to that to make sure it was consistent," says Manasse.
The remaining 7,000 formed the youth assembly and were housed in one of the smaller auditoria measuring 92m x 87m where two hangs of 10 Adamson Y10 with T21 subs, plus plus Adamson Spektrix and M15 front fills were again controlled via XTA DP226s with XTA GQ600's and an XTA Wireless link system.
"The Festival of Life has grown so much and happens during such busy periods that for the past few events we've begun collaborating with Concert Sound to meet the demanding sound requirements," says Canegreen's technical director Andrew Frengley. "This event has been the first time we've used the XTAs as overall system control and I am extremely pleased with the results."
(Chris Henry)
