Warwick, UK (July 6, 2023)—For the third year of Access The Festival (ATF), a three-day EDM dance party in Warwick’s Sherbourne Park, events specialist Sound Access worked with audio provider dBS Solutions to handle sound, fielding a Martin Audio WPS rig for the festivities.
With three stages in close proximity and a lot of low-frequency energy to contain, Sound Access owner Joe Baker worked to mitigate sound spillage. “Last year, noise rejection out the back was quite bad with the system we used,” acknowledged Baker. As a result, Sound Access collaborated with Chris Bogg at dBS Solutions who was happy to cross-hire his WPS and TORUS systems for the summer party.
Sophia Livett from noise consultants Acoustec set site sound thresholds, which Baker knew he could meet by deploying Martin Audio’s ‘Hard Avoid’ feature in the proprietary DISPLAY software.
The event featured live performance as well as DJ playback from house, disco and techno specialists. The main Daylight Disco stage was bedecked with mirrorballs and set in a Clearspan marquee, with a stage thrust. On the opening night French exponents, Session Victim and Bomel starred with live sets which were played out through six WPS elements per side, ground-stacked on 2 x 4 decks, working within the limitations of the marquee structure. With this configuration, they could project the sound above the head height but were restricted by the lower-than-expected roof height, and after time alignment, they were experiencing bounce back of the roof girders. “With an accumulation of reflections, we used Hard Avoid [in DISPLAY]; this worked extremely well and gave us the coverage we wanted.” They were comfortably able to achieve level at the FOH measurement position, with most of the HF firing down into the arena stage itself.
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A pair each of TORUS T1230 on the outside edges of the marquee, where the audience was bleeding out. As for the LF, a broadside array of eight SXC118 single cardioid subs provided tight control and the all-important rear rejection in the 15m x 15m space. “This was necessary because the sound was firing out across a lot of farmers’ fields and towards a noise sensitive country house,” he explained. “We were only talking about notching 2 dB at 50 Hz, so it was nothing drastic, but without that noise rejection from the main stage we would have had massive problems.” In the event they were able to isolate this area perfectly from the other two stages.
The smaller Groove Garden stage deployed a TORUS constant curvature ground-stacked system, three T1230 elements per side, attached via scaff bars and battens to the estate trees.
Further Martin Audio XD12 were used as biamped DJ booth fills, while a pair of CDD6s were deployed for front fill duties and a pair of WS218 subs (in stereo) were mounted onstage either side of the booth.
