Ilive Debuts At Kent Festival

An outdoor, musical theatre, military band, traditional choral, opera and a headline performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra event that also included the marching band of the Brigade of Gurkhas with fireworks and cannon finale has been given a sound boost.
Sound reinforcement system for the large scale Kent Open Air Classical Festival 16,000 capacity event, was handled by the SRD Group.
It used a range of units from its stock of Allen & Heath iLive digital hardware and using the latest 'DualRack' capability.
"With crowd coverage extending 365m deep x 100m wide, and due to the predominantly orchestral material, audio requirements reached 180 inputs.
"To compound this issue, the FOH footprint needed to be very compact due to crowd sight line issues," explained SRD boss Stuart Roberts.
"iLive was the obvious choice, as its flexible, distributed audio architecture makes it easy to build high capacity systems within a small footprint."
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was mixed on a separate system by specialist classical sound engineer, Ian Barfoot.
He provided 4 stereo subgroups to both the FOH and Monitor consoles, which took pressure off the engineers and provided a better audio balance within the Orchestra.
The main FOH system consisted of an Allen & Heath iDR10 modular MixRack loaded with 64 inputs - 56 analogue and 8 digital – connected to an iLive-80 Control Surface with a mixture of analogue and digital local outputs.
There was an EtherSound digital split to the Monitor system, which comprised an iDR0 miniRack connected to an iLive-112 Control Surface with 24 analogue local outputs.
The orchestra system consisted of two iDR10 MixRacks loaded with 128 inputs - 120 analogue and 8 digital - running in 'DualRack' mode, feeding 16 digital outputs - 8 digital feeds to the FOH system and 8 to locally required outputs - with 16 analogue outputs as back up.
"Everything worked according to plan," confirmed Barfoot. "iLive is still one of the best sounding, most intuitive digital desks around, which is why it was chosen. With the added flexibility, the channel count is doubled per system without compromise, making the choice of iLive even easier. After the event we received a lot of compliments from the artists taking part who remarked on the quality of the monitor sound, and to the best of our knowledge there were no complaints from the crowd regarding any issues with sound or coverage.
"We would definitely do it the same way again - the combination of good input sources with an excellent mixing console makes every ones job much more simple."
(BMcC/GK)