Jamaican reggae innovator and lovers rocker Beres Hammond took the stage at Clayton County International Park in Atlanta, Georgia, recently in front of a capacity crowd of 6,200. Behind the scenes, Collin Rigg’s Showmax sound production company fielded a Danley Sound Labs sound reinforcement rig that Rigg had commissioned for the show.

Several years prior, Rigg had abandoned the business, frustrated by the industry’s uptake of line array systems that delivered high SPL but little else: ‘For me, music means something personal,’ he says. ‘I like clean, hi-fi sound that lets you hear and feel the music. The competition was just loud and obnoxious, and line arrays were eating up my share of the market. So, I liquidated my business and bowed out.’

At a subsequent InfoComm show he came across ‘the strangest’ loudspeaker cabinets. ‘They were Danley boxes, and we got a demo and an explanation of how Danley technology works,’ he recounts. ‘That lit a fire under me, and after sitting on it for a month, I decided to pull the money together to buy a Danley rig and to get back into the game.’

Rigg purchased eight Danley SH-46 full-range boxes and four Danley BC-415 subwoofers, along with several Danley DNA multichannel, DSP-enabled amplifiers.

For the Hammond show, Rigg –with support from Danley Sound Labs and head engineer Ivan Beaver – deployed a pair of Danley J3-94 Jericho Horns, which are now commonly used for sports arenas and other huge venues where line arrays would be the accepted approach. The full show system comprised two Danley J3-94 Jericho Horns, six Danley BC-415 subwoofers, two Danley SM-80s for front fill, and four Danley SH-46s for side fills. All the boxes were split symmetrically to deliver solid stereo imaging. Danley DNA and EDA amplifiers with onboard DSP powered and conditioned the system.

Rigg ran into trouble just hours before the show was supposed to start – the stagebox that was supposed to come along with the package was missing. Several hours that were planned for system tuning instead were burned tracking down a replacement. ‘Thankfully, we were able to put the Danley system up quickly,’ he reports. ‘And that’s all we really had to do. The Danley boxes sound great even without any processing, so the small amount of system tuning we did brought it from great to perfect.

‘I’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands of shows, and I’m always aiming to give the audience a beautiful musical experience,’ he adds. ‘At the Clayton County International Park, I walked through the crowd and saw that people were fully immersed in the show. A bunch of people, without prompting, talked about how great it sounded. These are non-technical people who just love music. If they can detect that difference, I know it’s not just me. Danley really gives me the kind of clean, loud, hi-fi sound that I was always looking for.’

More: www.danleysoundlabs.com