Caribbean Audio supplied 40 D.A.S Audio Aero 12As to the Brugal Merengue festival
Puerto Rico - One of the most popular music festivals in the Caribbean, the Brugal Merengue festival is one of the region's most highly anticipated events. This year's festival drew a crowd of 25,000 people who filled the Hiram Bithorn Stadium to capacity. The event included performances by Latin Grammy-winning vocalist Milly Quezada, Sergio Vargas, and Kinito Méndez from the Dominican Republic, along with Gisselle, Manny Manuel, and Limit-21 from Puerto Rico. Longtime favorite group Conjunto Quisqueya made a comeback for a special performance.

Caribbean Audio of Puerto Ricowas contracted to provide both sound reinforcement and backline for this year's festival. Wil López, former chief audio engineer for Ricky Martin and president of Caribbean Audio, discussed the challenges of the project. "Being a baseball venue, the stadium is an open air facility. As a result, we not only had to deal with the fickle tropical weather where it can be sunny one moment and raining the next, we also had to contend with competing noise from the surrounding area - all while providing suitable coverage to a huge crowd. The event ran for 11 hours that day and presented a little bit of everything - including a torrential downpour during the afternoon."

40 new D.A.S. Audio Aero 12As were deployed, flown 20 modules per side at a height of 32ft in a left-right stereo configuration at the far sides of the 60 x 48ft stage area. Low frequency support was provided by 16 LX-218A high performance powered subwoofers - ground stacked eight enclosures per side, four units high by two units wide and located at the far sides of the stage.

Stage monitoring included 18 D.A.S. Audio SML-12A low profile, powered stage monitors that, for the most part, remained fixed throughout the day. "As we provided all the instruments for the performers," said López, "we arranged the setup in such a way that there were monitors at all critical points onstage.

"When it came to flying the line arrays," López continued, "the D.A.S. system was impressive. As this was our first project with the new setup using this many enclosures, I contacted head of engineering and R&D, Javier Navarro, prior to the job. I explained to that I was going to fly 20 enclosures and was concerned about the weight. Javier assured me this was not a problem at all, but he did encourage us to use two hoists on the system. That's exactly what we did and the entire process couldn't have been easier. With a crew of eight, we put the entire system together and had it fully operational in eight hours. That's very quick for a system of this size and scope."

(Jim Evans)


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