Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers using OSA’s new 115XT HiQ stage wedges at Ravinia Festival (photo credit: Patrick Gipson/Ravinia Festival)
New LA-RAK touring racks and coaxial 115XT HiQ wedges take up initial residency at Chicago’s popular Ravinia Festival
CHICAGO — On Stage Audio (OSA) recently made its inaugural L-ACOUSTICS purchase with the addition of a new monitor package comprised of three LA8-equipped LA-RAK touring racks and 16 coaxial 115XT HiQ wedges.
OSA purchased the system at the request of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, which used the gear for three months this summer in its 3,200-seat, open-air, covered pavilion. Hosting the summer residency of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1936, Ravinia also featured a diverse array of non-classical artists who used the monitors, including Vince Gill, Sheryl Crow, Backstreet Boys, Dave Brubeck, Ramsey Lewis, Buddy Guy, Jethro Tull, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, Cheap Trick, Joshua Bell, Sting, Counting Crows, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Carrie Underwood, Beach Boys, Nelly Furtado, Train and others.
Following the festival’s summer season on September 7, the L-ACOUSTICS racks and wedges will be available as a rental system package for tours and other productions.
“The decision to buy this system was initially driven by our client, but we’ve all come across these wedges on various tours and have always really liked them,” says OSA Senior Staff Engineer Carmen Educate. “So when Ravinia told us they wanted to use 115XT HiQs in their Pavilion this summer, we jumped at the chance to add them to our rental inventory. I’ve come to love the clean SPL that the wedge delivers as well as its extremely linear response when boosting level. It’s a very smooth and tight-sounding little speaker.”
Using L-ACOUSTICS monitors, Dave Brubeck performs with Ramsey Lewis at Lewis’s 75th birthday celebration concert at Ravinia Festival (photo credit: Russell Jenkins/Ravinia Festival)
Educate reports that the festival’s management, crew and performing artists have all been extremely satisfied with the monitor package’s performance. “Everyone there loves the rig,” he adds. “They’ve been more than happy with it, and so have we. Although this was officially OSA’s ‘maiden voyage’ with the brand, we really like the product and are hoping to move further into L-ACOUSTICS’ larger systems.”
According to Ravinia Festival Master Audio Technician Sam Amodeo, “Our summer festival schedule is extremely full, so every second is critical. The quality and fidelity of the 115XT HiQs and LA8s have been great and actually enabled us to save time on sound checks, so they’ve been a prized addition this year.”
“This is the first season for On Stage Audio at Ravinia and we could not be happier with the condition and performance of their audio package,” sums up Ravinia Festival Technical Director Mike Robinson. “Having OSA as a vendor and L-ACOUSTICS as a brand has pretty much removed all reliability concerns.”
Founded in 1904, Ravinia Festival is the oldest outdoor music festival in North America and attracts approximately 600,000 people to as many as 150 diverse performances each year. Over the past century, the festival has hosted such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Janis Joplin, Yo-Yo Ma, Luciano Pavarotti, Itzhak Perlman, Stephen Sondheim, Isaac Stern and Frank Zappa. For more information on the festival, visit www.ravinia.org.
Headquartered in Chicago with a satellite operation in Las Vegas, On Stage Audio, a division of OSA International, Inc., has been one of North America’s premier audio production companies for 25 years. To learn more about OSA, visit www.osacorp.com.
L-ACOUSTICS is a leading innovator and manufacturer of high-performance loudspeakers, amplifiers and signal processing devices for touring and installed sound markets. Known around the globe for pioneering and championing the modern line array loudspeaker concept with V-DOSC, the company has received numerous accolades for its K1, KUDO, KIVA, ARCS, XT coaxial loudspeaker systems and SB line of subwoofer enclosures, all powered and processed with the LA4 and LA8 amplified controllers in fulfillment of a “total system approach.” L-ACOUSTICS products for the US market are distributed by L-ACOUSTICS US of Oxnard, California.
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