Two events staged on a virgin festival site marked a major inaugural event for the Disclosure & Rudimental Present Wild Life – a four-stage, two-day event at Brighton City Airport, a general aviation facility in the UK. As its title suggests, Disclosure and Rudimental were the headline acts.

Winds gusting up to 30mph on the opening day were an easy match for the Martin Audio MLA loudspeaker system that was used for the event by Capital Sound. The system optimisations comfortably satisfied the 75dB offsite sound requirements of consultant Vanguardia, while at one point achieving 105dB SPL at the sound desk during Disclosure’s set.

As Capital General Manager Paul Timmins observes: ‘Some properties were as close as 400m away, and the measurement points varied from a travellers’ encampment with caravans to a church – whose 6pm Sunday service coincided with the rappers kicking off on the main dance stage.’

And yet with a dedicated line set-up by the promoters, as is customary with a new event, the number of complainants was significantly lower than expected.

Martin Audio Product Support Engineer, Chris Pyne, confirms that the event adopted the tried-and-trusted design template that has seen MLA dominate a raft of international events, from British Summertime in London’s Hyde Park to Rock in Rio in Las Vegas. ‘We achieved higher levels than we expected and this system just keeps proving itself time and time again,’ he says.

With the two Main and Dance outdoor stages complemented by two Khyam tents (including a dance tent) the challenge was to keep the sound contained without spillage.

‘I could progressively fine tune the optimisation on the second stage while the show was running to suit changing requirements without physically needing to move anything,’ Pyne adds. ‘Typically, heavy dance music has a pronounced low end 30 to 80Hz so the sub frequencies generated are large wavelengths; but we could re-optimise our sub array to tighten the horizontal pattern control. One of the beauties of the MLA systems is that it’s an evolving system adapting to the environment and needs of our partners.’

Both the Main and Dance stages featured similar PA configurations – with 17 MLA (plus an MLD Downfill) per side and 16 MLX in a broadside cardioid array. Main stage also featured four further MLA’s in a groundstack on one side – and there was a token presence of two delay towers, comprising eight MLA Compact and three DSX subs, set 80m back from the stage.

‘While delays weren’t really necessary with MLA, it formed a nice package, which was useful when the winds got up, enabling MLA to punch right through it,’ Timmins admits. He also confirms that, while the attendance capacity was pegged at 35,000 for this inaugural year, the longer-term plan is to raise this to 50,000-60,000 – and the reach of the PA was configured with this in mind.

Capital also took the opportunity to demo their MLA Mini as DJ monitors/fill in the dance tent, with two stacks of four each side of the DJ booth underpinned by an MSX sub. ‘This gave us a chance to experiment with different presets and we learnt a lot. The top end worked particularly well and physically it was perfect,’ he says.

All sound objectives were comfortably achieved, including running the two dance zones on late into the night – with a 1am terminal hour – after the other stages had closed at 11pm. Although this meant dropping the offsite level to nearer 55dB, production was still able to operate at up to 100dB on the dance stage.

Prior to that they had targeted 101dB for the afternoon acts and in the evening 102dB. Paul Timmins also confirmed that Disclosure’s SPL typically measured 103-104dB (Leq 15 minutes) but at one point did indeed reach 105dB, without exceeding the offsite limit.

Fellow Martin Audio partner, RG Jones supported Capital Sound with equipment and personnel, notably on the main Dance Stage. Simon Barrington was the overall event production director with Mike Oates running stage and site production. Crew included Toby Donovan (system tech, main stage), Jack Bowcher (system tech, dance arena) and Harm Schoepman (Capital crew chief).

Summing up, Paul Timmins says: ‘It was great to be able to use our network partners to put out nearly 200 MLA elements over the weekend. As for Wild Life, everyone was happy with their shows and all engineers commented on how great MLA sounded.’

More: www.capital-sound.co.uk
More: www.martin-audio.com