Celebrating one of Colombia's oldest carnivals, Carnaval is the 2009 Miami rebirth of that event. Featuring a variety of music, the event drew approximately 2000 spectators. With a crowd of this size, the sound system needed to be and offer considerable control of the sound dispersion characteristics. For Franco Sound, the company tasked with providing sound reinforcement for the event, the solution was to deploy a loudspeaker system drawn from the catalogue of D.A.S. Audio.
Based in Miami, Franco Sound is owned and operated by Ramon Franco, who also serves as FOH engineer for many of the projects his company services. "This festival had two stages running, with each offering completely different types of music," explained Franco. "On one stage, we had several popular Florida DJ's, including Dj Edgar V, Dj Armand Pena, Dj Ivan D, and Dj Tony Puccio, among others. For this, we needed a sound system that was capable of addressing a 2000 plus sized crowd with lots of low end for the electronic music
"Equally important, a high level of directional control was crucial, as the second stage offered traditional Colombian music. We knew the Aero CA-28A would be a great choice for the main line arrays because the system gives us the ability to focus the acoustic energy where it needed to be."
The system Franco deployed consisted of 10 Aero CA-28A self-powered line array elements - ground stacked five per side for the left-right mains, with each cluster including an Aero CA-215A powered subwoofer at the bottom of the stack. Adding additional low end reinforcement, each cluster sat on top of D.A.S. Audio's LX-218 self-powered bass-reflex subwoofer system.
Augmenting the left-right mains, Franco and his crew placed two additional centre stacks - each consisting of a D.A.S. Audio CA-215A subwoofer sitting atop an LX-218. Signal processing chores were handled by a D.A.S. Audio DSP-48 loudspeaker management system and a Yamaha LS9-16 compact digital live sound reinforcement console that resided at FOH. D.A.S. Audio loudspeakers were also used for the DJ monitoring setup. This system included two SML-12A powered stage monitors and a Compact 18 Sub.
(Jim Evans)
