Winner of multiple CMA and ACM Entertainer of the Year awards, country superstar Kenny Chesney’s summer tours continue to pack NFL and college football stadiums year after year. A key element of the Chesney tour’s success is the superb sound production provided by the team led by Phillip Scobee of Morris Leasing, featuring the world’s largest touring Electro-Voice sound system.
Scobee has upped the ante once again for Chesney’s 2009 Sun City Carnival Tour, adding more EV speakers and amplifiers to the equipment list while using the latest NetMax digital matrix control with FIR-Drive and IRIS-Net Version 2.0 control and supervision software to enhance performance to an unprecedented degree for a system of this size.
Developed and field-tested on the Chesney tour and at the annual Houston Rodeo – two of the world’s biggest, most critical proving grounds for audio technologies
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the FIR-Drive system employs
state-of-the art
Finite Impulse Response filters and processing to provide linear phase performance for sonic clarity and improved pattern control beyond all other DSP and system drive packages.
“This year we added another eight X-Line Xvls boxes,� says Scobee, “which brings our full-range, main loudspeaker total to 176, not including front-fills and floor subs. And it’s all NetMax/IRIS-Net again, but this time everything is FIR-based. We’ve helped develop FIR-Drive on this tour over the last couple of years, and now it’s complete; in terms of quality and quantity, the system has become what I envisioned when we started working with EV. Now we have FIR filters for everything.�
In addition to the extensive EV spec, Bosch’s Communications Systems Division brands are represented at every stage in the signal chain, including a Midas XL8 at front-of-house (with onboard DSP synched to the NetMax/IRIS-Net platform), two new Midas PRO6 desks for the monitor mixes, along with tried-and-true outboard gear from Klark Teknik. Dynacord’s VL 262 super-compact, high performance 2 x 6� two-way boxes serve as front fills.
Read the following article from July 2008 for an in-depth account of Scobee’s system design for the Kenny Chesney tour: Morris Leasing & Electro-Voice raise the bar for live sound on Kenny Chesney tourÂ
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