The revival of the Isle of Wight Festival also saw the debut of a new Meyer Sound Leo Family system to serve its main stage.
Supplied by Wigwam Acoustics, the new system powered served The Who, Faithless, Stereophonics, and Queen + Adam Lambert for crowds of up to 60,000. Key to the system’s selection’ its linear characteristics and precise directional control kept the festival grounds alive while significantly reducing bleed into nearby residential areas.
Vanguardia Consulting was responsible for assuring adherence to festival licence conditions: ‘Isle of Wight has been quite tough over the past few years due to the close proximity of noise-sensitive properties,’ says Vanguardia’s Warren King. ‘We did seem to get better results this year, and I think the main difference was that the system sounded subjectively louder than in previous years, which meant that although we started around 96dB at the start of the day, almost every engineer was happy with that as a level and could easily stay within the given limits.’
Eds John, FOH engineer for headliners Richard Ashcroft and Busted, was suitably impressed by the system’s performance: ‘Leo was stunning in the festival format,’ he reports. ‘Even when the wind was blowing strongly, the guitars were cutting through and staying smooth. That’s what you really need at a festival, as all too often your mix gets blown away by the slightest breeze.’
‘The clarity and detail were amazing,’ he continues. ‘With Richard you have a huge vocal sound, lots of guitars and massive strings to fit in your mix. It could get a little messy, but with Leo everything easily found its place. I pushed
up my mix at the start, sat back, and really enjoyed the gig. Also, I was impressed by the fact that there were only 14 cabinets per side in the main hangs. It definitely felt like there were more boxes than that.’
The reaction was welcomed by Joel Perry of Wigwam Acoustics: ‘As is the case with all of our shows, our aim is to provide the best sound reinforcement available. Judging by the comments received from our guest engineers, we achieved that goal here with deployment of the Meyer Sound Leo Family system.’
The main stage hangs of Leo-M line array loudspeakers were bolstered in sub-bass by 24 1100-LFC and 12 900-LFC low frequency control elements. Front and out fill systems comprised 24 Leopard line array loudspeakers, 32 Lyon linear loudspeakers as delays. A Galileo Callisto loudspeaker management system, running over an Optocore distribution network, used a total of 11 Galileo Callisto 616 and three Galileo Callisto 616 AES array processors.
The Wigwam team on site was headed by systems tech Bill Laing and crew boss Geoff Muir, with Jonathan Digby and Jon Brooks assisting at FOH.
