Held over the weekend of 7-10 July 2006, the festival is eccentric, charming and irresistible. The second stage at the festival was booked this year by The Truck Festival on the Saturday and on the Sunday by the Oxford Folk Festival. So, a challenge for whatever sound system was used, catering for the broadest range of material - the full-on rock of Aberfeldy and Goldrush, to the haunting voice of Kate Rusby.
Gareth Jones of audio rental company MLsoundadvice, responsible for all the audio on site, has been a great exponent of KV2 Audio products for some time and it was his decision to use the KV2 VHD system: "The VHD system was an ideal choice for this year's Truck Festival / Folk Festival stage - with the wide range of musical styles during the festival you need a system that can easily reproduce all those differing musical styles competently, and VHD does just that. The clarity and lack of distortion is apparent as soon as you start to listen."
The KV2 VHD speaker system is a very high definition, active driven, large format audio system for touring or fixed installation applications. The cabinet line-up consists of the VHD 2.0 mid/high cabinet and three different subwoofer modules - the VHD 4.18, the VHD 2.15 and the VHD 1.21. Nominal dispersion for the VHD 2.0 is 80° horizontal and 40° vertical. A Left and Right version of the speaker is offered in order to create larger format vertical arrays of the mid/high system. When two VHD 2.0s are arrayed vertically, horizontal dispersion is maintained while vertical dispersion is lowered to less than 10°. System response is 25Hz to 20kHz depending on the subwoofers selected.
Front-of-house engineer for the second stage Al Ashford added: "This system has it all, really clear and coherent audio, solid with more headroom than you could wish for - I can't wait to go out with it again."
MLsoundadvice Systems Engineer Neil White commented: "The system flew really quickly, and was great straight away. The combination of the 21" and 2 x 15" sub and mid-bass is awesome."
System control and amplification comes from the VHD 2000, a rack mounted controller/amplifier system specifically designed to actively drive the VHD 2.0 cabinet. It also contains control functions for the system and subwoofer signal routing to feed the VHD 3200 subwoofer amplifier. The VHD 2000 is the world's first system with proprietary digital signal delay technology using DSD components providing a 6MHz sampling rate.
Gareth Jones concluded: "After using the excellent KV2 ES systems in the past, the progress made with VHD I believe confirms KV2 Audio as a major player. The unique format of the VHD system really lowers truck space required, and with the ultra-low 'Q' horn configuration, potentially offers excellent return on capital invested."
(Lee Baldock)
