London Speaker Hire, the A/V rental division of The Hive Partnership, has added a Martin Audio MLA Compact system, to its inventory.

Already the first UK company invest in Martin Audio’s MLA Mini system, the company immediately pressed its new 16 MLA Compact enclosures into service on the inaugural On Blackheath Festival, featuring Massive Attack and promoted by Harvey Goldsmith.

Held on Blackheath Common in Southeast London, the open-air event hosted three stages and attracted a crowd of 25,000. High on its priorities was sound spill to avoid inconveniencing local residential properties. According to LSH Director Grant Turner, the promoters were well aware of the extraordinary control capabilities of MLA’s Multi-cellular Array control technology, having witnessed events at Hyde Park for AEG Live, where for noise pollution reasons the license had previously been in jeopardy.

‘Initially we didn’t have the kind of projects that warranted MLA Compact, and MLA Mini was perfect for our requirements,’ he says. ‘But increasingly this started coming up on riders. We had always said, after we saw the system at last year’s Plasa Show that we didn’t want to buy a piece of hardware but invest in a new brand.’

At the Blackheath event, billed as a ‘Food and Music Festival’, LSH provided infrastructure for the 600-capacity Village tent – featuring Chris Holland All Star Band and Jarvis Cocker (DJing) – running five MLA Compacts per side and four WS218X a side (with two in the centre) in a cardioid pattern, with four Martin Audio DD6 boxes for front fill and 12 Martin Audio LE1200 floor monitors for musicians’ reference. All the passive enclosures were driven by Martin Audio MA3.0 and MA18K amplifiers.

‘We had approached the promoters specifically, knowing how hard they had fought for a license in the face of strong resident objections,’ Turner says. ‘They knew what MLA had achieved in Hyde Park and Glastonbury. At Blackheath, we used the Hard Avoid preset to reduce the sound at the back of the tent and associated spill.’

Helping to optimise the system was the experienced Simon Honywill, who was brought in as consultant, while project manager was Sas Stewart.

The MLA Compact system had debuted at the Shambala Festival in Northampton, synced to a closing firework display – an event supported by Martin Audio’s Andy Davies. ‘We started getting requests for bigger jobs purely on the strength of having MLA Mini, because it was so rider friendly,’ Turner says. ‘And moving up to the MLA Compact, it could hardly have started better – with three events inside a month.

‘Harvey [Goldsmith] agreed to do an interview to camera about the quality of the production and then sent us a letter stating how amazing the sound was.’