Marking the liberation of the French city of Orléans from the English during the Hundred Years’ War, the annual Fêtes de Jeanne d’Arc festival was staged again this year to a crowd of around 21,000.
Along with parades, medieval festivals, markets, concerts and exhibitions, a late-night open-air DJ session followed on from a spectacular son-et-lumiere show. Laurent Wolf, Greg Cerrone and Da Fresh guaranteed a big turn-out, with revellers dancing the night away. AV rental company ACS, provided a Uniline compact line array system from French loudspeaker company APG, specified by Eric Grandmougin of specialist A/V and acoustic consultancy firm, Grandmougin Conseils.
The system comprised two hangs of eight UL210 mid/high cabinets and three UL115 low-frequency cabinets per side supplemented by 14 ground-stacked TB218S subs arrayed across the front of the stage. There was also a pair of delay towers each equipped with two APG4000LO and four APG4000HI cabinets from the Matrix Array series.
‘We excelled ourselves with the Uniline system,’ said Christophe Sireuil of ACS. ‘I’ve done quite a few shows with it now, and it’s always performed incredibly well, but this time in particular, I was astonished by the quality of the sound and the SPL we were able to achieve with so few cabinets – and even then, you could sense that the system was running well within its capacity. We didn’t have to push it hard at all, and we had crystal clear audio definition coupled with immense power all night long – it was great!’
Eric Grandmougin, who not only designed and specified the system but also helped to tune it, agreed. ‘We were able to achieve a really massive dance floor sound with a great “electro” feel without every reaching dangerous levels. It was an extremely satisfying result with excellent vertical and horizontal directivity control, despite the fact that we were surrounded by buildings on three sides. Christophe Sireuil of ACS did an excellent job, and I’d like to thank him personally for his hard work in making this such a successful event.’
