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Miami’s Ultra Music Festival Returns

This year’s Ultra Music Festival in March found Unreal-Systems/AgorÀ USA providing sound on the main stage for 55,000 people nightly.

The main stage may have featured fire, but it also had audio firepower in the form of 16 L-Acoustics K1 enclosures over four K2 downs on each side of the stage.
Ultra Music Festival’s main stage may have featured fire, but it also had audio firepower in the form of 16 L-Acoustics K1 enclosures over four K2 downs on each side of the stage.

Miami, FL (May 4, 2022)—Miami’s Ultra Music Festival has long been a pilgrimage for EDM artists and their fans. This year’s edition in March  found Unreal-Systems/AgorÀ USA tackling the main stage with an L-Acoustics rig for the first time, putting a massive K1-based system to work, keeping the nightly crowd of 55,000 dancing.

Hosting performances by Afrojack, Armin Van Buuren, David Guetta, DJ Snake, Illenium, Kygo, Marin Garrix, and Tiësto, this year’s Main Stage sported left and right main arrays of 16 K1 enclosures over four K2 downs, each backed by eight flown K1-SB subs, and adjacent out-fill arrays comprised a dozen K2 per side. Anchoring the low-end was a line of 48 KS28 subs spanning the face of the stage, while four additional K2 spaced out on top of the subs delivered solid front-fill. Power was exclusively delivered by LA12X amplified controllers housed in LA-RAK II touring racks, and all signals were routed using the Milan-AVB protocol via P1 processors and LS10 switches.

FOH and monitor mixes were provided on respective DiGiCo Quantum338 and SD10 consoles. This year, Joe Williams served as the FOH systems tech on the Main Stage and was duly impressed with the K1 setup. “The system threw 180 meters with no delays, no problem,” he says. “It performed extremely well, and all of the artists were super happy.”

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Tackling monitoring for all the acts onstage, ten X15 HiQ stage monitors lined the stage lip, accompanied by left and right side-fills of four Kara over two SB28 subs each. In the DJ performance spaces, two left/right pairs of “Texas headphones”—each comprising four Kara over two SB18 subs—were provided.

Despite all that firepower, the festival had to ensure that it met new, tighter restrictions regarding audio levels. Unreal-Systems/AgorÀ USA “Captain” Andre Serafini noted, “With Ultra back in downtown Miami again, after two years off for Covid and two years at Virginia Key, the city was cracking down on noise bleed this year. The festival’s promoters hired a sound mitigation company—there were sensors all over the Main Stage site—but the L-Acoustics system just performed beautifully, even under the new, much stricter guidelines. It’s been a long time coming for K1 to be on this festival, and it was pretty spectacular to hear it there finally.”

The Live Stage, the festival’s second-largest stage located in an amphitheater at Bayfront Park, has used L-Acoustics systems for many years, but 2022 also marked the first time K1 was flown there. Hosting performers like Alison Wonderland, KSHMR, Madeon, Oliver Tree, Pendulum, Slander and Sofi Tucker, that stage sported main arrays of eight K1 over four K2, eight K2 per side as out-fills, 32 KS28 subs, and more managed by system tech James Tejada.

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