livereport UNITED KINGDOM SSE Audio is box clever at V Festival
It’s always challenging supplying an audio system to a major festival, but what if the event is split across two sites which are run simultaneously, located 150 miles from each other, and share the same bill? It’s just a walk in the park(s), according to SSE Audio, writes Paul Watson
SINCE ITS inception in 1996, V Festival has grown to become one of the UK’s biggest and most loved music events. Each year, during the penultimate weekend in August, a string of international artists play at the 90,000-capacity-per-venue event, which is held in two parks: Hyland Park in Chelmsford, and Weston Park in Staffordshire. SSE has been providing PA and control to V Festival since the beginning, and this year it deployed around 450 loudspeakers, 150 amplifiers and eight mixing consoles to the event. SSE project manager Dan Bennett says the reason the company is able to handle such logistics is a combination of
detailed planning, hand-picked staff, and a unique and efficient ‘flip-flop’ system. “We have a very strong
warehouse team and operations department, and then a team of project managers, me included, who design the systems and walk the respective parks during the event,” he explains. “To keep changeover times down, we use a flip-flop system on the main stages, which is an artic’s worth of equipment: two ready-to-go FOH boards and two monitor boards, plus all of the necessary amplifiers, cabling and infrastructure that goes with it. “We also use the same core
crew, to keep things as efficient as possible. For example, the same crew boss that does the
[V south] main stage also does the main stage at Reading, with the same flip-flop; post-V, we had that system ready to go in just a day and a half.” Evidently, efficiency is indeed everything: SSE applied its flip-flop system to both of V Festival’s main and second
stages, and each system was then tweaked before being moved on to either Reading, Leeds or SW4, all of which took place the following weekend; and, more efficient still, those same flip-flop systems were initially constructed back in June and used on Download, T in the Park and T4 on the Beach. Although the flip-flops were
used by many major bands during the day at V, the top
four bands are allowed to bring their own monitor console, and the top two can bring both FOH and monitor boards. To avoid any logistical nightmares, advanced communication is essential. “We are always in touch with the headliners at the start of the summer to run the system by them and make sure they’re happy,” he says. “By the time V came up we’d already seen Snow Patrol a few times, and
Teenyweeny nearfills. Live.
Headliners The Stone Roses were one of the highlights this year
Robbie McGrath , FOH engineer for Ian Brown and his band
The E4 loudspeaker is just a little bit smaller than a pint of beer. A coaxial built miniature, with a conically symmetric 0° directivity. Made for even reinforcement in the near field, it can be mounted in any orientation, and is almost invisible. While it sounds distinctively bigger than it is, it remains neutral, clear, transparent and intelligible even at high sound pressure levels. As with all the little systems in the d&b E-Series.