Vincent Tempels and his team at Arto were among the first to invest in Nexo's new flagship line array technology. Arto added 36 sets of STM to its inventory at the end of 2012, and has deployed small, medium and large configurations, ranging from David Guetta in concert to civic and corporate events.
Building on a long relationship with Nexo concert sound products, Arto's engineers have found the STM concept and operation to be highly intuitive, and uniquely suited to the rental company business model.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary in its Tour& Taxis location in Brussels, Couleur Café is a three-day urban and world music festival with four stages handling funk, hip-hop, reggae, dance, soul and rock acts. Main headliners this year included Basement Jaxx and Dizzee Rascal.
Arto's chief system tech Christophe Loncour explained the system configuration. "For the main stage PA, there are 15 sets of STM M46 main and B112 bass cabinets per side, with some S118 subs flown beside the arrays and some groundstacked in front of the stage." There are Nexo Alpha cabinets for stage fill, but no side arrays as the audience area is long and thin, and there are other stages in close proximity.
Using a beam-steering design, the top subs have been given a different delay setting to the bottom ones. To keep stage noise to a minimum, not all the subs are flown - there are 12 on the ground, some facing forward and others back, and running in a mix of cardioid and omni modes. In total, there are 48 subs - slightly more than NEXO's typical recommended ratio of 1:1:1, but this is because organisers preferred not to have delay systems, and the S118 subs on and in front of the stage had to cover an audience area of 120-150 metres.
Elsewhere at the Couleur Café, one can find a variety of Nexo systems. The Univers stage has Geo D, with Geo SUBs and RS18s for low end. The Move stage is set up with Geo T and CD18s.
(Jim Evans)
