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Arguably the highlight of the entire European festival season took place at Roskilde, Denmark on Sunday July 2nd, as Roger Waters and his band performed Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety.
Backed by a ten-piece band which included guitarists Andy Fairweather-Low, Snowy White and Dave Kilminster - all world renowned musicians in their own right - Waters performance on the main (Orange) stage brought the Roskilde festival to a fitting climax, concluding eight days of music which featured over 170 bands, including glam rock New Yorkers the Scissor Sisters and UK favourites Franz Ferdinand and Morrissey, playing to at least 79,000 festival goers.
2006 marked two significant anniversaries for the Orange stage - it was the 10th year that Søburg-based DPA Soundco had provided FOH sound and the 15th anniversary of Turbosound loudspeakers forming the Orange Stage PA.
"It’s an outdoor festival and the Orange Stage is very much a rock stage," says DPA Soundco’s Sten Jensen. "Clarity is vital, but the system needs to be able to really punch the sound out and also maintain consistency in all weathers. The Roskilde organisers have always felt that a line array simply isn’t capable of delivering that.
"We used Flashlight until 2005, then we changed to the current Aspect® rig," he continues. "It’s the next stage in development in point source, there’s more high end and definition but absolutely no loss of power." With improved efficiency this is possible with 30% less kit, which delivers loud and more consistent sound.
The 2006 Orange stage system comprised 48 Aspect TA-890H mid-high cabinets, flown four wide by six deep per side; 48 Aspect TA-890L low cabinets, ground stacked three wide by eight deep per side and 16 ground stacked TSW-218" subs. Infills were two TA-890H and two TA-890L per side, amplification by ten T25 / T45 Amp racks and main system processing by two XTA DP-448s, controlled via Audiocore.
For the first time DPA Soundco used an Optocore digital returns snake and left the XTA processing on stage. Sten Jensen commented, "This really worked. We had an AB between 150m of analogue and the digital solution - much more HF and much tighter low end. We will always do this in the future. The sound was better and the system was perfectly reliable."
With a site that’s 165m long by 125m wide, it’s a major challenge to the PA to ensure that sound coverage is of a uniformly high quality, especially on a large flat site, which is inevitably prone to wind interference.
The Aspect system was pushing out a consistent 104dBA LEQ over 15 minutes at the mix position which, with a steady breeze blowing, demonstrated the efficiency of the system. "The wind didn’t affect the sound at all," notes Turbosound sales director Rik Kirby.
A third of the main system was sub-hired from Light & Sound of Brixlegg, Austria. Roskilde was only the second outing for the company’s brand new Aspect cabinets and it gave the Light & Sound’s Markus Klotz an excellent opportunity to hear his new acquisition being worked to its full potential. "I was really impressed with the performance," he says. "It was easy to rig and with a little tweaking sounded great. I am really looking forward to many successful years with our new toy!"
Interestingly, this year a slightly different approach was required by the FOH engineers, because the two-storey mix tower was split into two single-storey positions, each placed in line with the main PA arrays. "
I thought the system sounded great and was very well set up," says Scissor Sisters’ FOH engineer Dave Kay. "I think a big factor was the deployment of the PA system and the fact that the mix position was big and open and on the same level as the audience, not two feet above them. All festivals should have mix towers like this - we don't need to see the sound! I also liked the mix position being far off centre, so keep up the good work."
"In our opinion, more of the audience benefited from a better sound because of the off centre mix position, as opposed to just the centre crowd getting the best sound," agrees Rik. "It worked very well, most of the engineers were really pleased with how they sounded. For the SPL the festival demands and the impact the organisers want to achieve, it’s very difficult to see how it could be done without a point source system."
Sten Jensen concludes: "The system sounded fabulous. Everybody was really happy and amazed by its punchiness. The organisers said to me ‘You’ve found the perfect system for Roskilde’."
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