Europe’s biggest country music festival, C2C: Country to Country, is staged each March simultaneously at London’s Virgin Media O2 arena, Glasgow Hydro and Dublin 02. With three days of the best in country music and programming, SSE Audio fielded Shure digital wireless systems as part of the audio package.

For headline bands especially, the artists and musicians needed to be able to move around the stage freely without being tethered down by a cable. The same applied for the backline and monitor tech crews that need to be able to move around the wing and backstage area, making a wireless microphone system essential.

Twelve Shure Axient Digital microphones with a mixture of handheld and lavaliers, along with 12 ways of PSM1000 IEMs, and an Axient Spectrum Manager were selected: ‘Axient Digital allows more channels to be allocated into a frequency range than with previous analogue systems, which increases the ability to fit more channels into a coordination than before, observes RF Tech, John Reynolds.

Frequency coordination was highlighted as a main hurdle to overcome on this project – planned in advance by the SSE/Solotech office so the technical team could confidently go to each site knowing that everything would work together seamlessly. ‘An additional challenge on this festival was antenna placement – ensuring antennas had good coverage of the entire stage while avoiding a large amount of LED screens took some thinking about,’ Reynolds notes.

With multiple acts at each venue across the three days, some specified microphone and IEM transmitter gain/sensitivity settings that reflect settings in their show files. ‘With Axient Digital, it was super easy to change these quickly, on an act by act basis, as required. My favourite feature of the system is the ability to monitor all receivers from one. Using the Dante feature is extremely useful, less time is spent plugging and unplugging headphones,’ Reynolds says.

The backstage team found the active frequency management of the spectrum manager and Show Link enabled them to sort issues on the fly, without the artist even knowing there was ever an issue, whereas previously there could have been a need to go onto stage to swap a mic out that was suffering interference. This can now be done from backstage which they found invaluable.

The British weather added a further set of challenges to C2C this year – with ferries unable to run between Ireland and England, the bands that played Dublin on the Saturday night and London on the Sunday had none of their equipment. But using the house festival RF system, the team were able to accommodate each band with all the requirements they needed to make the show happen.

‘It made for an interesting and at times challenging day but it was a great feeling at the end of the day knowing we’d pulled it out of the bag and the show went on without issue,’ Reynolds says. ‘This was the only challenge – due to the capabilities of Axient Digital, a lot of the previous challenges are less existent than before! Stability of RF is far improved with the Axient Digital systems, that certainly gives you a better sense of confidence, especially when the artist may decide to leave the stage and enter the audience.

‘Wireless workbench, along with Spectrum manager, really does make scanning and frequency allocation a breeze. The speed at which the packs sync nowadays is excellent, even more so if a Show Link is deployed. Super easy to configure, super reliable, we had no dropouts or issues with the equipment over the duration of the festival at all – audio quality is second to none. I rarely have issues with Shure systems so I can’t say I’ve had much interaction with the support team, which says it all really.’

‘It’s a great compliment to Shure technology and the teams behind Axient and PSM that RF on C2C worked flawlessly – the work that John and the team at Solotech provide is greatly appreciated by all the team here at Shure. We continue to provide support and training wherever is necessary and will continue to do so as we head into what will hopefully be a full summer of events in 2022 and beyond,’ concludes Shure UK Director of Pro Audio, Stuart Moots.