One of the largest live music events in the world, the recent New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival featured seven days of music using a dozen stages. Attracting an estimated 400,000 people to celebrate the music and culture of New Orleans and Louisiana – and covering jazz, blues, R&B, gospel, folk, rock, country and bluegrass – sound reinforcement for two of the Festival’s stages was handled by The Sound Source.

For each stage, Sound Source owner and lead audio engineer, Tim Kilbride, used five JBL VT4886 loudspeakers per side with VRX932LA Constant Curvature Series loudspeakers for front fills and out fills, as well as SRX712M speakers for stage monitors. In addition, The Sound Source used Soundcraft Vi1 and Si Compact digital mixing consoles, BSS Audio FCS-960 equalisers and dbx 160A compressor/limiters.

‘This is our third year using VerTec loudspeakers at Jazz Fest,’ he says Kilbride. ‘We’ve been extremely happy with their performance. The VerTec arrays provided exceptional sound even under less-than-ideal circumstances. The Lagniappe Stage, one of the stages where we worked, is in a very non-acoustical-friendly area, and the PA also shoots directly into a large tent that is located about 40 feet from the front edge of the stage. Ordinarily, this would be a sonic nightmare, but we were able to supplement the main system with some VRX cabinets on a delay line at the front inside edge of the tent, which greatly improved intelligibility. We also used additional SRX712M speakers as out fills for the outer seating areas, which further improved the sound.

‘Outside of Jazz Fest, we’ve also produced events of more than 7,500 people using our JBL VerTec VT4887ADP powered line array elements,’ Kilbride adds. ‘The vocal clarity of all the VerTec models we’ve used is very impressive. Their ease of set-up and use is also very appealing to our techs. The opportunity to generate additional revenue supporting other VerTec users by supplying additional units has been a real plus as well.’

More: www.bigboyaudio.com