Having specified Martin Audio’s MLA Compact PA for festival shows where sensitive offsite noise has been an issue – along with the smaller MLA Mini on corporate events – Bristol-based SWG Events recently provided sound reinforcement for the second year to the Hampton Court Palace Festival, having worked for the production company that runs HCPF on other shows.

In addition to the single large stage, which featured two main hangs of eight MLA Compact and six MLX, SWG provided BlacklineX on a small bandstand in the East Front public picnic area prior to the show.

This year’s all-star line-up included UB40, Elbow, George Benson, Jack Savoretti, McFly, Kacey Musgraves, The Human League, Michael Ball & Alfie Boe, and Crowded House. To provide even coverage for audiences up to 3,200-capacity SWG supplemented the two main MLA Compact hangs with DD12s for centre and left/right out fill, with eight WPM for front fill and six Blackline X8 for balcony fill. A monitor package in the shape of 16 of the XE500 was powered by Martin Audio’s iKon iK42 amplifiers.

Aside from the quality of the music, the orientation of the stage – enabling the Palace to provide a spectacular backdrop – was the icing on the cake. ‘The idea is to create the illusion that the audience felt they were inside the palace rather than just in front of it,’ SWG Event Technology Specialist Ian Williams explains. ‘We illuminated it and handed control over to the lighting designers so it could be used as a spectacular backdrop.’

With Williams himself project managing, leading a team comprising Matt Pope, Ryan Bass and Kieran Jordan, the shows functioned like clockwork. Engineers simply plugged consoles into a pre-time aligned, pre-optimised system, and were provided digital inputs for left, right, sub and fill.

‘Our system technicians then worked to keep the optimisation as current as possible, working with the engineers to find ideal times within their sets to load in new profiles to the rig’, Williams says.

SWG’s long successful tradition with Martin Audio equipment now enters its next stage with the recent purchase of WPL. ‘We’ve already done a number of shows with our new system and we have received some great comments from engineers that have used it,’ Williams reports.

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SWG Events upgrades Martin Audio inventory