Electro-Voice is crowd-pleaser at Glastonbury’s Jazz World
For the fourth consecutive year, an Electro-Voice line array system has charmed a diverse line-up of national and international artists on the Jazz World Stage at the UK's Glastonbury Festival. APR Audio provided an X-Line system, controlled by EV’s NetMax digital matrix for the first time, which nailed it for the Black Eyed Peas, Jamie Cullum, Baaba Maal, Roots Manuva, and The Streets, among others.
The Jazz World Stage began as the first extra music stage after the main Pyramid stage, and was originally called Stage Two. Its program has evolved over the years, and the venue now hosts a generous helping of jazz, a wide range of world music, and many types of funky fusion in between.
Working closely with the production team, APR Audio’s system designer Matt Gunter made some key changes to the PA set-up this year, including the deployment of EV’s new Hydra™ time-synchronized, high-frequency vertical plane wave generator, which provides excellent far-field summing. “The Hydras very effectively eliminate any trace of oscillation or vibration, so we didn’t have to EQ at all. With 12 X-Line modules flown each side (10 Xvls and 2 Xvlt), the system worked straight out of the box.”
Gunter also redesigned the layout of his sub-bass. “Same as last year, we brought 32 Xsubs but we reorganized their placement for additional control and to make sure we kept the bass in the field.” APR deployed X-Array modules for side- and drum-fills, and Xw15 wedges for stage monitoring. Powering the system were 44 EV P3000RL amplifiers running IRIS-Net control and supervision software. “We didn’t have a single amp failure all weekend,” says Gunter.
At the heart of the system was EV’s NetMax N8000 controller, providing overall system delay and EQ, which acted as a central matrix for the three Midas consoles in use. “The NetMax unit was directing all the submixing traffic,” says Gunter. “For left and right PA, subs, front-fill output, as well as a stereo output that we sent directly to the BBC. And it could have done more!”
Paying tribute to their team, especially front-of-house engineer Rob Ritchie, Gunter and APR owner Andy Reed emphasized that, “Although we’ve got the largest EV inventory in the UK, the key to getting Glastonbury right is our crew – we’re confident that we’ve got the best people on the Jazz World Stage. As for the PA, everybody was very happy with the output level and with the quality of sound. Overall we achieved exactly what we set out to do, sticking to 96 dB for the whole weekend, give or take a few hotspots. We convinced a few more engineers that EV’s X-Line is a great product, and very easy on the ear.”