A key component of Capital Sound’s summer music festival schedule is the Sziget Organisation’s three major gatherings in Hungary. For several years, the company has serviced the back-to-back four-day Volt rock festival in Sopron, before trucking the equipment southeast from the Austrian border to Balaton Sound, which takes place on the beach of Zamárdi over five days.
Having established Martin Audio’s MLA system at these two festivals, in 2014 the organisers adopted the system for their flagship event – the Sziget Festival itself.
And with all three of the events growing significantly in size, Capital Sound General Manager Paul Timmins says that delivering bespoke sound designs that take into account the peculiarities of the different site dimensions and terrains – all within a tight budget – presents a real challenge.
For 2016, he enlisted the services of Polish MLA partner Muśnicki Sound Systems, who provided their MLA System 36 and, as a result, will support Capital Sound at the events for the coming two years: ‘Given the logistics, and the different deployments required for each site, we always need to be very clever with truck space,’ Timmins says. ‘This is a two-truck operation but for budget reasons we can only bring one from the UK, containing all the control and a lot of the speakers. It’s therefore great to be able to source the shortfall of equipment from within Eastern Europe with another Martin Audio partner – and Maciej [Muśnicki] and his team were fantastic.’
Described as ‘multi-genre’ and drawing an attendance of more than 100, 000 to the wide open spaces and green fields of Sopron in 2015, this year’s Volt Festival headliners included Iron Maiden, The Prodigy, Wiz Khalifa, Axwell^Ingrosso, Slayer, Damien Rice, Paul Kalkbrenner and Sigma. For main stage PA Capital fielded 17 MLA plus an MLD Downfill on each wing and for side hangs eight MLA stage left, and five on the facing flank.
In addition, 30 MLX subs were set in a spaced cardioid array – a pattern increasingly adopted by Capital where greater LF punch is required (and tight control is of less importance). Five stacks of three MLX each side (with the bottom enclosure reversed) were spaced either side of a centre fill of 12 WS218X subs, on a separate send. Front fills consisted of 12 Martin Audio W8LC line arrays while two small ‘shadow’ delays, comprising three W8LC’s a side, were flown behind the mix tower.
Specialising in house music, and set on Balaton Lake, the 10th Balaton Sound Festival recorded a total visitor number of 157,000, breaking all records for the five-day beach party. ‘This is a much a wider site,’ Timmins says. ‘It’s more like a rectangular football pitch, and around 90m from the stage to the edge of the lake. Because of the arty nature of the stage, there are limitations on weight loading – so it is fortunate that MLA is not overly heavy.’
For the main hangs Capital Sound rigged 13 MLA and an MLD Downfill on each side, with eight further MLA outfilling on each flank. They deployed the same 30 MLX (again in spaced cardioid pattern but without the centre WS218X). A further five MLA were set across the stage for front fills.
Balaton Sound did, however, require more delays than Volt. Two main towers each featured six W8LC on each, under which were six WS218X subs to throw the low frequencies in particular back towards the lake. Additional ‘shadow’ delays in the form of three W8LCs were set behind each of the two FOH mix positions.
Lining up to perform were Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Martin Garrix, Armin van Buuren, Steve Aoki, Martin Solveig, Paul van Dyk and many more dance specialists – all able to achieve dance-level SPLs from MLA, evenly distributed across the frequency range.
This year almost half a million people attended the ‘Island of Freedom’ throughout the mammoth, week-long Sziget festival, which saw headliners the Chemical Brothers, Rihanna, David Guetta, Muse, SIA, Manu Chao La Ventura, Hardwell and many other international names. This time the main hangs used 17 MLA and an MLD Downfill on each side, with nine MLA and an MLD Downfill providing side hangs. Subwoofers consisted of 40 MLX in a spaced array comprising six stacks of three on each side of two stacks of two MLA – all evenly spaces across the front. Front fill was provided by 20 W8LM Mini Line Array elements.
In addition, there were four delay points using a total of 32 MLA and four MLD Downfills, with LF extension on the delays provided by 16 WS218X across all four towers in a cardioid design. Two further shadow delays were set behind the mix tower, either side of the video screen, with four MLA Compact in each.
‘Everything worked so well with MLA last year that this year was pretty much plain sailing,’ Timmins reports. ‘The new sub design proved extremely popular, particularly with Muse [whose sound was mixed by their veteran FOH engineer Marc Carolan]. They were particularly complimentary.
‘Although Hungarian festivals tend not to have SPL measured, Sziget epitomizes the perfect sound level, running at 100-103dB. And those levels present no problems with offsite thresholds for a system such as MLA.’
Underlining the strength of Martin Audio’s MLA partnership, Hungarian sound production company BG Event has invested in MLA Compact and provided the system for the Europe and Colosseum stages at Sziget. BG Event’s Balázs Szentiványi reports that, for the former, they supplied 16 MLA Compact (eight on each wing) with eight WS218X subs, a pair of Martin Audio XD12 providing infill, with monitors in the form of a WS218X (for DJ and drum monitors) and ten Martin Audio LE1200 wedges. They also equipped the Colosseum stage with 20 W8LM, eight WS218X, a pair of XD12 for in fill, a pair of S18+ and four LE1500.
