BELGRADE, Serbia – The annual Belgrade Jazz Festival brings together some of the world's best jazz musicians, and this year's season kicked off in the Great Hall of Belgrade's Sava Center, with a performance by legendary jazz guitarist, Pat Metheny. Once again with the 27th edition, sound and lighting specialists Studio Berar were entrusted with providing full technical support and they turned to HARMAN's JBL VERTEC® VT4888 midsize line array elements and a Soundcraft Vi6 digital FOH console as their main sound reinforcement components.
With ovations greeting each one of Metheny's classic tracks, the two VERTEC hangs (10 elements per side) also provided crystal clear sound reinforcement for performances by other legends such as Charles Lloyd and Joachim Kühn, Bollanija Stefano, Marc Ribot, Cristina Branco and Elliot Sharp, as well as rising stars such as Tigran Hamasyan and Anat Fort.
Studio Berar, the HARMAN Professional distributors for Serbia, were contracted by production company and festival organizers, Dom Omladine Beograda, a long-standing business partner, for whom they have provided HARMAN solutions on many occasions in the past. With Momcilo Berar and Emil Berar managing for the supply company, the JBL system—complete with ground-stacked VT4880 fullsize arrayable subwoofers and JBL VRX932LA Constant Curvature loudspeakers—was optimized for 3,700 seats. The entire system was powered by a combination of Crown I-Tech IT4000 and IT8000 amplifiers.
With Studio Berar sound technician Ivan Paplacko at front-of-house, the Soundcraft Vi6, with Vistonicsâ„¢ II interface, was set up with a generic ‘house patch', which the individual technicians were able to personalize. The company's marketing manager, Lazar Josanov, explained that, “Ivan was able to provide a very simple introduction to visiting sound engineers, although most were already familiar with the platform. The Vi6 was the perfect selection for a multi-act show—largely because of its simplicity of use, combined with the Vistonics interface. This allowed the technicians to have all the data right before their eyes [and at their fingertips], with simple logical shortcuts.”
He concluded by saying that everyone—from the visiting engineers to the production company—had expressed their satisfaction with the knowledge, experience and professionalism demonstrated by the Studio Berar team.
Finally, this year's festival was dedicated to Serbian artist, Dusko Gojkovic, in recognition of one of the country's most successful jazz artists, who was celebrating his 80th birthday.
HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets — supported by 15 leading brands, including AKG, Harman Kardon, Infinity, JBL, Lexicon and Mark Levinson. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of about 12,500 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported net sales of $4.0 billion for twelve months ending September 30, 2011.