Among Italy’s most highly anticipated annual music events, the Lucca Summer Festival takes place in the city’s famous Piazza Napoleone. This year saw Robbie Williams perform to an audience upwards of 20,000 fans on the festival’s final evening, closing a season which had already enjoyed performances from the likes of Blur, The Chemical Brothers, Norah Jones, Placebo, Kiss, Simply Red and Sigur Ros.
Martin Audio partner, Amandla Productions, has been a reference rental company for the event for many years and provided technical management, including a full audio and lighting package.
System engineer Tommaso Bandecchi and Amandla CEO David Lapini recognise the challenges of the ever-changing requirements of different sound engineers. For audio they again turned to the ‘never disappointing’ experience of a Martin Audio flagship PA. Bandecchi reports that 28 MLA enclosures were used for the main hangs (14 per side), with 24 MLA Compact for out fill (12 per side). Meanwhile, 28 MLX were used for the sub array, 24 WPS for front fill and 20 MLA for delays in two groups of ten.
The management of the signals in the two main areas was entrusted to Martin Audio’s dedicated Merlin digital matrix processors via AES, as well as remote control via the redundant VU-Net protocol.
‘There are many surprising aspects of the MLA system,’ Bandecchi says. ‘The integration of the system with the WPS allowed control of the entire system via VU-Net software. This allowed us to obtain great precision and control even using part of the MLA family optimisation system, and to have great flexibility and scalability even in the fills.’
He adds that, by virtue of the particular amplification and DSP management system, MLA delivers great flexibility in obtaining the required frequency response.
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