The Windy City’s LakeShake music festival brought together more than 30 of country music’s biggest stars, including Lady Antebellum, Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, Jason Aldean and Martina McBride. With such a line-up, Thunder Audio knew that the sound system was essential to performers and audience alike.

The chosen system relied on JBL VTX Series speakers and Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers, to serve the thousands of fans who assembled on the shores of Lake Michigan for three days of country music.

‘VTX has a great reputation in the country music industry,” says Thunder Audio Business Development Manager, Greg Snyder. ‘Many top touring acts include VTX on their rider because of the abundant power and clarity that the system provides. When it comes to country music events, VTX is our go-to choice.’

Thunder Audio has relied on JBL equipment for many years, recently using VTX for festivals and tours including Lollapalooza, Moogfest and Austin City Limits. The system used for LakeShake included main hangs of 16 VTX V25-II cabinets per side, side hangs of eight V25-II cabinets per side, flown arrays of five VTX S28 subwoofers, a horizontal cardioid array of 30 VTX S28 subwoofers in front of the stage and delay hangs of 12 VTX V20 per side. Using VTX V20s as the delay system enabled Thunder Audio to have a significantly larger and more even coverage area, with a small-format cabinet that exactly matches the tonality and performance of the V25-II main hangs, thanks to factory-standard V5 tunings.

The system was powered by racks of Crown I-Tech 12000HD amplifiers with JBL HiQnet Performance Manager 2.0 software used to control and configure the entire system for best performance. The software dramatically reduces design time, simplifies networking and takes the complexity and guesswork out of system configuration.

‘We use Performance Manager for sound design, equalisation, amplifier programming and data – it’s our primary control for the audio system,’ Snyder says. ‘We find it to be a very accurate system that we can stand by.’