Eclipsing both Rock in Rio and the Glastonbury Festival, the recent British Summer Time (BST) saw the largest deployment of Martin Audio’s MLA sound reinforcement system at a festival anywhere in the world.

Now enjoying its sixth year at Hyde Park, AEG Live’s Barclaycard Presents British Summer Time has settled with sound reinforcement partner Capital Sound in its use of MLA site-wide. For many, the highlight of this year’s event was the opening day and Roger Waters’ Us + Them tour and its use of an extensive surround-sound addidtion to the massive main reinforcement system.

Capital rigged the main stage and outfield identically to 12 months ago, with the exception of the additional surround provision for Waters’ spectacular curtain raiser to the ten-day festival. Playing in the UK for the first time, his Us + Them tour used surround effects to give the audience a truly immersive experience which covered 21 songs spanning Pink Floyd classics such as ‘Breathe’, ‘Us & Them’, ‘Time’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’, as well as tracks from his solo Is This The Life We Really Want.

A very clear political voice drummed throughout, seen during the performance of ‘Another Brick In The Wall Part 2’, with school children from the Grenfell community (specifically The Rugby Portobello Trust) taking to the stage dressed in Guantanamo Bay prisoner boiler suits, with t-shirts bearing the slogan ‘RESIST’.

This theme continued following the interlude. With visuals projected on screens out from the stage, a series of images and quotes from President Donald Trump flashed across screen during ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’, ending with the defiant statement, ‘Trump is a Pig’. Also appearing was an inflatable pig parading through the crowd, Battersea Power Station chimneys extending above the stage, and even a Dark Side of the Moon prism created from lasers.

The performance used auxiliary PA towers to add a further 108 MLA/MLA Compact cabinets to the existing of 222 MLA series cabinets deployed in the Park – 330 enclosures in total. These provided 12-point surround sound effects, at positions set by Loud Sound’s Dan Craig and fine tuned by Roger Waters’ sound team to give the audience an immersive experience.

For the remainder of BST – which ran until 15 July – the main Great Oak Stage had two hangs of 16 MLA and a single MLD Downfill per side, with 13 MLA and an MLD Downfill for the side hangs. The sub array comprised 32 MLX in a broadside cardioid design (21 front-facing, 11 rear-facing). With 12 MLA Compact serving as front fill, all MLA components operated on the same network.

In the field, the main ten delay towers comprised seven MLA and a single MLD Downfill, supported by 12 MLX subs, while delay positions ten and 11 comprised eight MLA Compacts.

Waters captured the essence of the set with his closing speech: ‘All of us here in this beautiful planet deserve equal human and civil rights. And these rights are irrespective of ethnicity or religion, so they would extend to my brothers and sisters in Palestine. That’s all I have to say.’

The show ended with a rendition of The Wall classic ‘Comfortably Numb’ and a firework display.

The build-up to Waters’ performance was fuelled by Richard Ashcroft’s vintage performance on the Great Oak Stage – featuring hits such as ‘Break The Night With Colour’ from his 2006 album Keys To The World, and ‘This Is How It Feels’from2016’s These People. The former Verve frontman, sporting a mirror ball jacket, offered a timely reminder of why he remains one of Manchester’s finest musical exports, and his closing rendition of The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ will go down as one of the opening day’s most iconic moments.

Before Ashcroft was everybody’s favourite bearded blues singer, Seasick Steve – the opening act on the Great Oak Stage. Steve delivered a crowd-pleasing set with hits such as ‘Barracuda ’68’ and ‘Summertime Boy’, even offering a glimpse into his anticipated forthcoming album.

The network

Continued growth of the event has required sound production company Capital Sound to deploy an increasing number of Optocore converters to provide digital signal transmission over optical-fibre across the vast site. The surround sound set-up for 2018 required Capital Sound’s Robin Conway to design a new Optocore multi-node system based around 21 X6R-FX-8AE/8MI interfaces and an Optocore DD32R-FX at FOH to accommodate an AES signal distribution.

Capital deployed all of its own Optocore interfaces with Gilles Bouvard’s GB4D in France supplying additional surround sound units – linked by 24 lengths of multimode fibre across 1km of the site to create the loop – and the DD32R-FX AES interface. ‘I wanted to run the show AES,’ Capital Project Manager, Robin Conway explains, ‘The feeds onto the network were all AES and the system was clocked from the Dante network. Everything this year was digital and synchronous.

‘This was the first time we had run a DD32R-FX at FOH, and certainly I have never programmed an optical network of such a size,’ he comtimnues. ‘But Optocore is so good it just runs and runs. Once we had synchronised issues such as fibre speed, sampling rate and had assigned IDs to the various devices, everything just fell into place and worked fantastic.’

This network architecture has been deployed by Capital Sound on numerous occasions and met the approval of Roger Waters’ sound team. ‘We used existing delay masts where possible for the surround sound to minimise the number of additional Optocore nodes we needed to create but still needed to erect a further nine towers, all of which had to come down at the end of the show,’ says Capital General Manager, Paul Timmins.

‘Roger Waters’ sound team – engineer Jon Lemon, system tech Dean Mizzi and Josh Lloyd, who did the set-up with our system tech Toby Donovan – achieved everything they wanted,’ says Account Manager Martin Connolly. ‘All have sent us positive emails thanking us.’

The other stages...

Martin Audio systems also served the festival’s other stages. On the Barclaycard Stage (Stage 2), eight MLA Compacts are flown on each side of the stage, along with 14 of the new Martin SX218 subs, while the popular Martin Audio DD12s provided front fill. The Moretti Bar used a full Martin Audio system, comprising a pair each of DD12 and CSX-LIVE 118 subs for the live stage with four Blackline F12 stage monitors, while the bar area features a distributed system of DD12, DD6 and PSX subs.

Elsewhere, Capital equipped the VIP Pavilion this year with 12 Martin Audio Blackline F8+.

Thus a site that was once thought to be unworkable because of the way punitive offsite sound thresholds had impacted on sound levels in the bowl, has now been consolidated by Capital Sound,and a combination of Martin Audio’s MLA PA and Display optimisation software.

Summarising, Capital Sound’s Martin Connolly stated that wholesale complaints from Mayfair and Kensington residents is now a thing of the past: ‘No-one really raises the question of restrictive sound levels any more,’ he said.

The same weekend Capital Sound were also servicing the Volt/Balaton festivals in Hungary, followed by Kew the Music, which added a further 149 MLA family enclosures in use at the same time. Alongside Connolly in Capital’s 24-strong BST crew, Paul Timmins, took responsibility for the other stages while Al Woods returned from Dubai to serve as main stage crew chief. For Martin Audio, Chris Pyne lent additional MLA system support.