Québec City Summer Festival’s Bell Stage and audience area
Québec City, Canada (August 25, 2011)—Solotech recently supplied audio for the 43rd annual Quebec City Summer Festival, tackling all sound at the Bell Stage.
Despite its modest beginnings in 1968, the annual Québec City Summer Festival (Festival d’été de Québec) is now recognized as Canada’s largest outdoor performance event. Attracting more than 1.5 million people over its 11-day span each July, this year’s production involved nearly 300 musical performances spread out across three outdoor stages and seven indoor halls.
The primary performance venue for the festival is the Bell Stage, which, from July 7 through 17, hosted everyone from Ben Harper, Elton John and John Fogerty to Simple Plan, Avenged Sevenfold and Metallica, among others.
Following an initial audio design concept by 20k President Alexandre Forgues, Montréal-based Solotech served as the official production supplier for the Bell Stage again this year and deployed a full L-Acoustics loudspeaker system. The main LR arrays were comprised of 14 K1 line source elements plus three Kara down-fills per side, each paired with an adjacent array of eight K1-SB subs. This arrangement was complemented by hangs of eight V-Dosc plus three dV-Dosc addressing the far left and right sides. Six additional dV-Dosc were spread across the stage lip for front-fill, while two dozen SB28 – all ground-stacked in cardioid configurations – delivered the low-frequency impact.
Out in the audience area, twin towers of nine Kudo plus a third hang of nine dV-Dosc functioned as the first delay ring, while four towers of eight V-Dosc plus four SB-218 subs comprised the second delay ring. This setup reached more than 115,000 fans during the most packed performance.
Last year’s Québec City Summer Festival was one of Solotech’s first opportunities to use its new K1 system; Solotech Senior Project Manager David Brazeau remarked about the 2011 edition, “For this year’s festival, we improved the consistency of our low-end coverage and created an even more impressive impact. Even at 800 feet out from the stage, the audience had the level of impact that made them feel that they were ‘in’ the show rather than simply ‘at’ the show. K1 is a truly performant system that is globally accepted. We have never had an engineer not be excited to mix on it, and the comments from both concertgoers and artists on the sound at the festival this year were extremely enthusiastic.”
Solotech
www.solotech.com
Québec City Summer Festival
www.infofestival.com
L-Acoustics
www.l-acoustics.com
