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Rooms with a VUE W
ith its Dave and Stinger portable PA systems spending considerably more time on pub stages than MI shop floors, it was only logical that LD Systems would have a crack at the pro market and design some loudspeakers that could get off the ground altogether and be flown for a couple of thousand people at a bona fide concert. The VUE series, launched under sister brand LD Premium at Prolight+Sound 2009, took the ‘bang for buck’ philosophy on which its forebears built an enviable reputation and transferred it to an area of the industry normally the preserve of manufacturers such as EAW and JBL. The LD Premium range was developed by a team of
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For us, as with any dry hire firm, it’s about return on investment and you cannot argue with the VUE system’s credentials in this
respect.
Justin Miller Soundtruth
experienced audio designers and FOH engineers in the USA and Germany, using premium components such as Eminence drivers and Bang & Olufsen amps. The series comprises two-way, full- range loudspeakers, array systems and subs, the flagships of the range being the VA-8 and VA-PS215 sub, offering a frequency response of 70Hz to 19kHz, 34Hz to 400Hz and a peak power handling of 1,200W and 2,400W, respectively. The VUE range has been on the market for about 18 months now and the amount of LD Premium branding seen flying around PL+S 2010 was testament to the great reception it had received in Germany and Continental Europe in its first year. Parent firm Adam Hall will confirm this, but will add, with a furrowed brow, that the reaction in the UK hasn’t quite been as enthusiastic. This will strike anyone who has read the spec sheet as odd, but to those who have heard the system and seen the price tag, it is completely baffling. In a bid to remedy this, Adam Hall recently flew a group of engineers, dealers and journalists to Germany for a
32 audioPRO December/January 2010/11
The rest of Europe loves it, so what is it that the UK doesn’t get about LD Systems’ new LD Premium line array? Rob Hughes travelled to Germany to find out…
demonstration of the VUE range and, in particular, the VA-8 line array system. Among the guests were Justin Miller of Bedford-based hire firm Soundtruth and Andy Pike from online dealer What PA. As we listened to the VA-8 arrays and fourth order bandpass VA-PS215 subs outside the vast Adam Hall warehouse in Neu-Anspach, ably skippered by R&D man Marcus Torvinen, it quickly became obvious why the company was so frustrated at the UK industry’s unwillingness to take the new system under its wing. Justin Miller offered an explanation: “I think there’s an automatic association of LD Systems as a budget and small PA manufacturer that makes loudspeakers that are only really appropriate for gigging musicians and not for professional concert use. But the LD Premium range is a far cry from this. It’s a line array that performs exactly as a good line array should.” Already familiar with the performance of the VUE system, it was perhaps to the slight anticipation of Adam Hall’s UK general manager, Andrew Richardson, that we would all be suitably impressed. What he probably didn’t expect, however, was that the loudspeakers would be getting their first high profile airing in the UK less than a week after the demonstration. It seemed that Justin Miller was sufficiently taken with the VA-8/VA-PS215 rig to specify it for an imminent London gig hosted by the Grand Order of Water Rats and featuring performances by Jo Pasquale and Tony Christie. Miller, who had sub-contracted the job from Vibration Music, planned not only to deploy the VUE array system, but also to utilise the series’ 15-inch and 12-inch point-source boxes onstage as monitors. But the story doesn’t end there – assuming the GOWR gig goes smoothly, Miller and Richardson might just have a more
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