Skan's system technician for the tour, Tom Tunney, explains their findings, "We took a d&b system out for Sigur Ros late last year. A short run, maybe three weeks, the system was based on J-Series with some Q-Series for fill. We drove the whole PA with D80s.
"The most immediate thing we noticed was an indirect benefit of the active power correction, when we applied the 'pull' on the service with no gain reduction anywhere on the signal path it just sounded clearer. The power saving was also significant; with sixteen J-TOPs a side run from D12s we would normally see a draw of around 60A per phase; with the D80 we were seeing around 20A. I'd taken out a full Powerlock mains distro and the truth was I could have run the whole PA, a modest arena system don't forget, off a 32A three phase CEE Form distro."
Packaging is another significant criteria for Skan, "We always look at space saving, at four channels in a 2RU module each D80 basically gains you 4RU of space compared to the four channels of the D12. We have already redesigned our racks to accommodate this benefit. Adding the line gain from losing the d&b SenseDrive return wire to each cabinet, means we can now run 16 boxes off two of our Socapex signal feeds.
"Naturally there's a truck space gain as well, and it's not as marginal as you might imagine: Sigur took four single racks a side; that wouldn't have even filled half of one of our large scale touring carts. So downstream we will be rethinking them as well. It was a challenge to convert all our Socapex feeds to NLP4 in time for the Sigur tour, but it works quite nicely. For the SUBs it's very tidy, we just run an NL8 to a pod of two J-SUBs. It's a seamless upgrade for us really, ArrayCalc to R1 to D80, three steps and you're all set up and ready to go."
(Jim Evans)
