Chicago, TX (October 13, 2016)—The annual Lollapalooza festival always fields an exciting array of acts, and this year was no exception, offering up the likes of Ellie Goulding, Major Lazer, Lana Del Ray, The 1975, Future, Disclosure, HAIM and more. Ensuring the massive crowd could hear every note, Livonia, MI-based Thunder Audio brought in a large-scale JBL VTX Series system for the Bud Light stage.
“We always set up the system as flat as possible out of the box without a lot of processing or equalization—the system already sounds great with the JBL voicings,” said Greg Snyder, vice president of Sales at Thunder Audio. “We’re handing the FOH engineers a very flat and neutral system that works well for any type of music, so they don’t have to do a lot of work to get the sound they want for their artist. This makes it much easier to meet the artists’ expectations and everyone had a great time using it.”
The system Thunder Audio deployed included two main arrays of 18 JBL VTX V25-II, two arrays of eight JBL VTX V25-II for outfills, eight S28 subwoofers flown per side, and 30 S28 on the ground deployed in 10 clusters of three. The entire system was powered by 72 Crown I-Tech 12000HD amplifiers and Thunder Audio used JBL HiQnet Performance Manager 2.0 software to configure, optimize and monitor the entire system.
As with last year’s festival, the Thunder Audio team faced some significant challenges during deployment. The site received lots of rain in the week before the festival and the area in front of the stage retained a lot of water. Thunder Audio needed to get the system up quickly to avoid tearing up the ground.
“We had to make sure the audience could enjoy where they were standing without getting stuck in the mud, so we needed to build the system quickly while still maintaining the site,” said Snyder. “VTX is one of the most user-friendly systems to deploy, since it can easily be flown standing up or laying on its face. Deployment was very quick and within a couple hours we had all the main clusters and out fills up. Then all we had to do was fork down our subwoofers, which we placed on pallets to keep them out of the mud.”
Harman
harman.com
