ADLIB Audio supplied sound for the Love Music Hate Racism Festival 2009, staged at Britannia Stadium, Stoke, UK, organised by Stoke City Football Club and Stoke-on-Trent City Council.
The action-packed artist line up included Reverend and The Makers, Beverley Knight, The New Beautiful South, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Ironik & Chipmunk, Helsinki, VV Brown, The Beat, Bashy, Mick Jones & the Rotten Hill Gang. Other musicians and performers including Pete Doherty, Eddie Izzard and Kelly Rowland spoke out against racism.
ADLIB's team was crew chiefed by Marc Peers, the system was designed by Tony Szabo and Dave Kay was looking after FOH. They had to accommodate the assorted audio needs of all performers with very quick changeovers and so adopted a festival style flip-flop system at both ends of the multicore.
The main goal was to produce clarity for both speech and numerous music genres around the stadium for the 20,000 audience. The fact that speakers and other performers were onstage during the changeovers brought an additional challenge.
Szabo chose 16 V-DOSC speaker elements a side for the main arrays on 17m towers, coupled with 12 subs a side on the deck including centre fill subs, plus L-Acoustics ARCs and dV-DOSC stacks for front and out fills. The whole system was powered by L-Acoustics LA8 amplifiers.
At front of house Kay ran two Soundcraft Vi6 consoles assisted by Declan Fyans who covered the second board. Combining digital and analogue preparation techniques, they created show files for all of the bands appearing, these contained basic parameters such as gains, filters, VCA and FX settings. The drum mix was also copied to all of the bands show files so that each band wasn't starting from scratch. This gave those turning up with their own engineers the basic building blocks of their show - and with no sound checks, just a quick line check and straight onstage - this made a huge difference to ensuring it was smooth running and good sounding.
"This is where the Vi6 really comes into its own," explains Kay, who found himself giving intensive Vi6 training to some engineers whilst the previous band was playing. "You can walk up to it and 'play' immediately because of its intuitive layout