The annual three-day Tunes in the Dunes festival took place again on Perranporth Beach in Cornwall recently, having used the same site for 11 years after evolving from live music events at the beachside Watering Hole –the UK’s only bar on a beach. This time around, the headliners were McFly (Friday), Craig David (Saturday) and Ocean Colour Scene (Sunday).
Based nearby in Plymouth, Martin Audio partner Nub Sound provided the technical infrastructure, pitching eight Wavefront Precision Compact (WPC) boxes per side and a cardioid sub array of eight SXH218 in a castellated format for rear rejection and to limit stage spill. On duty was Nub Sound Director of Operations and sound engineer Josh Small, who explains that the main hangs were driven in two-box resolution from Martin Audio iKon multichannel process-control amplifiers, and the front fills individually amplified.
‘We were in a very long arena, not particularly wide and needing to get consistent audience coverage from in front of the pit to right out to 55-60m behind FOH. That’s something we can achieve really well with the Wavefront series.’
He also spoke of the environmental requirements, which his sound team were able to meet thanks to the close control offered by Martin Audio’s proprietary Display software.
‘Although Perranporth is only a small town, there are a number of high-quality hotels and residences on the cliff-top, which we were pointing towards, and our neighbours naturally have concerns about being disturbed by events happening on this site,’ he says. ‘Therefore, we have to be really considerate about our offsite noise and we have to be really thoughtful about how we are going to impact the local populous.’
His solution was to use the Hard Avoid setting in Display at the back of the arena ’really pushing the priority in the optimisations to get as much offsite noise control as possible We specifically aimed the PA acoustically to avoid sending anything offsite.’
Small also mentions the logistics of getting the kit down to the beach from the cliff top: ‘It was a case of getting everything to the nearest hard standing car park, forking it off a lorry onto tractor trailers, bringing it to stage and then forking it off again.’
