Napa, CA (June 14, 2016)––You might think that noise control on the annual, three-day BottleRock festival in Napa, CA would be easy—after all, the whole area is fields of grapes, right? Wrong. There’s tons of nearby residences, which meant the onus was on audio provider Delicate Productions to ensure acts reached the crowd and not much else.
With that in mind, Delicate fielded a full complement of Martin Audio on three stages at BottleRock 2016, providing sound for 72 acts, including Stevie Wonder, Lenny Kravitz, Grouplove, Buddy Guy, Florence + The Machine, Death Cab for Cutie, Ziggy Marley, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rodrigo Y Gabriela, among others.
As Delicate’s general manager George Edwards explains, “There’s Silverado Trail, a two-lane road about 40 feet beyond the area stage right of Jam Cellars with residential housing on the other side. And 700 feet straight ahead of the stage beyond the field we were on, is more residential housing. So noise control was obviously critical.
“We needed to maintain 105 dB c-weighted front of house with a mitigation system in place. With MLA, we never exceeded the noise limits beyond the site, with only one noise complaint from a resident who never bothered to leave their name or number out of a three-day sold-out festival with four stages and 140,000 spectators.”
The main stage system consisted of two hangs of 16 MLA and 2 MLD (downfill) cabinets a side with 24 MLX subs in a single point source array in the center ground-stacked in front of the stage. A dozen W8LMs were used for front fills in three clusters of four on the subs with a cluster of eight W8LCs for house right VIP fill on a cantilever and a pair of hangs of eight MLA Compact flown from towers for delays. Venue Profile consoles were used on all stages for FOH and Monitors
Stage 2 (Midway) also faced downtown Napa at the end of a field that usually serves as the carnival midway for fairs. Edwards and his team set up a system with 14 W8LCs a side with 18 WS281X subs and 6 W8LMDs for front fills.
Martin Audio
www.martin-audio.com
