Confronted by high winds and driving rain, the three-day Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival pressed ahead with Palmetto Soundworks and a JBL VTX Series loudspeaker system recently.
‘We were in really poor weather conditions the whole weekend – we gave floating subs a whole new meaning,’ says Production Manager, Jared Miller. ‘The performance of the VTX rig was excellent, even with that much water. I was really impressed with the sound quality and reliability.’
The Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival line-up featured renowned artists, including Joe Bonamassa, The Robert Cray Band, John Mayall, Canned Heat, The Mavericks, Tab Benoit, Heritage Blues Orchestra and Sonny Landreth. To serve them, Palmetto Soundworks used JBL VTX Series line arrays for performance and ease of deployment. The system enabled guest engineers to mix the performances with minimal EQ adjustments.
‘The high end was really smooth, and the entire VTX system sounded really great out of the box,’ Miller says. ‘A lot of the guest engineers commented on the smoothness of the top end and the overall sound quality. From my point of view as a provider, it’s an easy day for me when guest engineers can start setting up, and it already sounds good. I don’t have to convince anyone of the quality of the VTX rig.’
The system included two main arrays of 12 VTX V20 loudspeakers, four groundstacks of three VTX G28 subwoofers, four groundstacks of two VTX S25 subwoofers and two VTX F12 for front fill. It was powered by Crown VRack 12000HD and VRack 4x3500HD amplifiers, which also performed well despite limited airflow. JBL HiQnet Performance Manager 2.0 software allowed the sound team to closely monitor the system through the bad weather.
‘Performance Manager 2.0 performed flawlessly – we knew we were going to have bad weather, and the software really allowed us to stay on top of the system,’ Miller reports. ‘The VTX arrays and VRack amplifiers performed great through some truly terrible conditions. There were no hiccups in the system.’
More: www.jblpro.com
