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Symbolised most famously by its market, the London borough of Camden has always had an affinity with alternative culture, fashion and music. Featuring a host of bands, the well-established mixing with the completely unknown, the Camden Crawl is a unique festival with one ticket buying access to a whirlwind experience of live music in 15 different Camden venues. This year it was seen as the ideal opportunity for leading audio rental company Britannia Row to give a demanding field test to Turbosound's brand new NuQ loudspeakers.
2007 was the first time that this unusual festival took place over two days, 19th-20th April, with household names like Travis, The Charlatans, The Damned and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club sharing the same stages as lesser-known artists such as I Was A Cub Scout, Fear Of Flying and Vincent Vincent and the Villains.
A staggering variety of music was played by over 80 acts during the two days with most of the venues being relatively small and not designed for live music, so the bare minimum of space was available, necessitating compact but powerful audio systems. Britannia Row Productions supplied audio to seven of the venues, with the company confident enough in Turbosound's brand new NuQ system to give it pride of place in two of them. "Because we were working in so many venues and there were so many bands playing, the idea was very much to have a standard system in all of them," says Britannia Row's Roly Oliver.
"We needed to deliver a package that was very simple and very compact, but delivered great sound. Self-powered Turbosound cabinets gave the size, quality, reliability and flexibility we needed - and we also wanted to give the new NuQ cabinets a tough test!"
The NuQ systems were installed in The Cuban restaurant and the Oh! Bar, using four NuQ-12 mid-high cabinets, two per side, with four B18 subs. The five other venues supplied by Britannia Row were the Black Cap, Camden Tup, Earl of Camden, Enterprise and NW1, each of which utilised four QLight™ TQ-440 mid-highs and four TQ-425 subs, with all venues also featuring six TFM-420 wedge monitors.
"We wanted to provide the audiences, venues and promoters with great sound but, as there were a lot of new acts involved, we also wanted to raise their hopes in a situation like this," adds Roly. "We wanted to help them out and give them a rig they wouldn’t normally get in such small venues. We provided world-class equipment, the most up-to-date possible for that size of space, which gave the bands a huge advantage. Having an easy-to-use, no compromise system took a lot of pressure off their engineers."
The Camden Crawl is a tough gig for any sound company, but the preparation work and the quality of the product ensured that everything went very smoothly.
"The quality of the products we were using made things go incredibly smoothly," concludes Roly. "Things were very relaxed because with any other factors such as using a lot of different equipment manufacturers. The systems overcame all the acoustic challenges - we literally couldn’t have done it without the right combination of gear and crew."
Photo courtesy of Yamaha
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