NORTHRIDGE, California – Launched
in 1995 by ESSENCE magazine, the ESSENCE Music Festival is a New Orleans
celebration of African-American music and culture that showcases a variety of
classic and contemporary artists. Premier Sound Services (PSS) of Baton Rouge,
Louisiana brought in a bevy of HARMAN Professional equipment for the festival’s
Coca-Cola and Verizon Superlounge stages, including JBL VerTec®
line arrays, Crown amps, Soundcraft
mixing consoles and BSS, Lexicon and dbx signal processing.
The
recent 2012 festival took place at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and featured
acts as diverse as Aretha Franklin, Keyshia Cole, Mary J. Blige, Gary Clark
Jr., SWV, Dru Hill, the Stylistics and many more.
“This
was a major festival and we brought in a major portion of our inventory,” noted
Russ Bryant, Director of Operations and Co-Owner of PSS. “For both Superlounge
stages, we had to stack the line arrays on top of the subs as flying was not
feasible in the venue. Because the rooms were very wide and had relatively low
ceilings and structural columns just on either side of both stages, for each
room we put one stack on the inside of each column pointing directly forward
and one stack outside of each column at 45 degrees.”
The
Coca-Cola Superlounge featured four main speaker ground stacks of three VerTec VT4888 midsize line array elements mounted on a VT4888-SF
frame atop three SRX728S subwoofers. The speaker complement also included four VerTec VT4886 subcompact line array elements for front fill, four
VT4886 and two VT4883 subcompact arrayable subwoofers for side and drum fill,
plus 16 SRX712M floor monitors. Thirteen Crown I-Tech 12000 HD amps powered the main line arrays, with nine I-Tech 8000
amps for the monitors. A 96-channel Soundcraft Vi6 console handled front of
house mixing.
The
Verizon Superlounge stage employed four ground stacks of four VerTec VT4887A compact line array elements each, mounted on a
VT4887-SF frame atop three SRX728S subwoofers. The system also included four VerTec VT4886’s for front fill, two stacks of two SRX722 speakers
and one SRX718S sub for side fill/drum fill, plus 12 SRX712M stage monitors. Main
amplification was provided by eight Crown I-Tech 8000 amps, two I-Tech 4000
amps and one I-Tech 5000, with six I-Tech 4000’s driving the monitors. PSS also
used HARMAN HiQnet System Architect™ and JBL HiQnet Performancer Manager™ to
set up and control both stages.
Soundcraft
Series FIVE 48x4 and 52x26 consoles were used for front of house and monitor
mixing, while the system utilized a host of HARMAN signal processors including
BSS FCS-966 and FCS-960 equalizers, other BSS compressors and noise gates, a
dbx 1046 quad compressor limiter and Lexicon PCM96 and other stereo reverb
units/effects processors.
“I
can consistently depend on JBL no matter what the situation,” said Bryant. “I
have used JBL speakers since I got into the business in 1984. When we decided
to purchase a line array system, we considered all the speakers on the market
but decided that VerTec
best met our needs from a price/performance standpoint.”
“One
day we’ll be hanging 16 VerTec
boxes per side in an arena and the next, stacking VT4888’s and VT4886’s in a
club with a national touring band. While other speakers may work for one
application or the other, we’ve found that our VerTec inventory handles any requirement while delivering all the
volume and quality we need. Also, since JBL introduced the VerTec
V5 DSP preset tunings, VerTec has become even more rider-friendly.”
“In
fact, we may be the most impressed by the VT4886,” Bryant noted. “We use them
as front fills, side fills, drum fills and down fills under our VT4888’s and
have even hung them 12 per side in smaller venues to do loud rock shows. It is
the best-sounding, smallest, loudest box I have ever used. We have 40 in our
inventory and plan to purchase more.”
“I
also need to single out the Crown I-Tech HD Series amplifiers,” Bryant added.
“We use a variety of models and they are simply amazing. No other amplifier is
as accurate—we’ve scoped them and verified this against other amplifiers –and
is as pleasing to my ear. The internal processing allows us to run the V5
presets, and I find that the speaker limiting is sonically more pleasing and
protects our transducers better. They were a big part of the superior sound
quality we achieved at the ESSENCE Music Festival.”
For more information on Premier Sound Services, please visit
www.pssaudio.com
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