The annual Bardentreffen Festival in Nuremberg is reckoned to be Germany’s largest world music festival, attracting more than 200,000 visitors over its three days. For 2016, Bardentreffen focused on a variety of music from around the globe on the theme Sounds of the Islands.
For the second consecutive year, Barowski provided sound reinforcement for the main stage, situated on the Hauptmarkt in front of the city’s Town Hall. The main PA comprised an Electro-Voice X-Line loudspeaker system, with further EV Xi-series enclosures for out fill and close fill, as well as drum fills on stage. Monitor speakers included wedges from Rocksound and L-Acoustics. For amplification, Barowski again turned to Powersoft – the company first fielded X8 racks for the 2015 festival, and increased its inventory for this year. ‘We now have five X8 racks and an additional X4 touring set,’ says Board Chair, Michael Barowski. ‘Each amp in our rental stock occupies a single rack for maximum flexibility.’
In addition to the X4/X8 the production company used additional Powersoft amplifiers for other applications, such as driving delays and fills. The move to Powersoft had been carefully thought-out: ‘We spent a lot of time researching how to replace our stock of different amps and controllers in the most efficient manner,’ Barowski says. ‘We sold most of our recent amps in order to use our X4/X8 to power everything – from 5-inch fills to festival-size PA.’
Barowski also knows that additional headroom is available if necessary, via a further X8 rack and X4 patchbay from the demo stock of Powersoft’s German distributor Laauser & Vohl: ‘We have significantly reduced our variety of amp racks and therefore our time for set-up, checking controllers, false deliveries on site. In fact since using Powersoft, our rate for checking misapplication or false cabling within racks is at zero.
‘On top of that, we need less space in our warehouse as the racks are fully stackable, easy to handle and lightweight compared to our previous inventory. The ability to store several controller setups and configurations, even via smartphone, along with the wide library of supplied presets for different types of PA are a major step forward for our company.’
In terms of deployment at Bardentreffen, Barowski ran the sound system via Dante using Powersoft’s two redundant digital streams, connected to Yamaha CL5 digital mixer at FOH, PM5D for monitors, and two Rio 32-16 stageboxes. The festival was run via five-core Ethernet Multicore (one line adapted for analogue signals as Intercom/Talkback/Shoutbox via CatCore stage boxes).
Michael Barowski describes CatCore as, ‘the perfect fit for Powersoft X8 or similar eight-channel amps, as it meets their requirement for a compact patchbay solution.
‘We were looking for a scalable solution for transporting, renting and using our X8s’, he elaborates. ‘Our wish was to establish a standardised rack for dry hire, providing the user all necessary connections on the front and keeping the rear of the case closed. And so we decided to design a multifunction panel in cooperation with the CatCore guys.’
For the touring racks, these are modified CPA racks manufactured by Amptown, and have a footprint of 60cm x 80cm, measuring a third or quarter width of a standard truck. ‘A double stack is exactly 1.2m high, which matches most of our cases when tipped in the truck, therefore a real advantage compared to what we had previously. Now we can load our trucks faster and more effectively; being able to dispense with super-heavy amp racks is a real advantage especially for delivery to small locations with mini-trucks.’
Logistics within the warehouse have also improved: ‘just pick a rack, and select and configure your preset and away you go. Any amp fits to any speaker – which is perfect.’
Finally, Barowski regularly controls and configures its amps via the Powersoft Armonía software. ‘We also use it on events to keep an eye on everything and even have Armonía backgrounds for our CatCore patchbays.’
