DPA Soundco's system designer Gorm Jakobsen was responsible for PA on three of Roskilde's six stages, including the 11,000-capacity Arena Stage (the second largest), and the Ballroom stage, which hosted the world music events. In the past, Jakobsen has used systems including Turbosound's Floodlight and Flashlight and, last year, the JBL VerTec. He comments: "They all worked, although, of the three, the line array was the best design for the space. However, this year, we used GEO T for the first time, and it was absolutely perfect. I've never heard anything like it in this tent."
The system was set up with 14 T4805s and two T2815s in each of the left and right arrays. The eight CD18 sub-bass units either side of stage had to be positioned about 10m away from the speaker hangs, giving an additional benefit of powerful sub bass in the outer areas of the tent. "We didn't tune anything on the PA," says Jakobsen, who was baby-sitting the artists' engineers at the Midas Heritage 2000 desk. "We had flat EQ throughout, just a notch filter at about 3k. The only processor I used with the system was the new EQ station from TC Electronic.
"The Arena tent is about 60m deep, so it was quite a lot of boxes for the space. Because it's a rock 'n' roll stage, we wanted to have headroom in the system. I arrayed the top six boxes with 0.12° between them, and then made the 'banana' curve from there. Taking the high frequencies out on the top boxes by trimming the HF amplifier on half power meant that we were able to build up the low end and the mid-range, using the top boxes only for headroom . . . not a thing you'd normally do with a line array, but it worked spectacularly well."
For the smaller Ballroom Stage, DPA Soundco supplied another Nexo GEO T system, configured with five T4805s and a single T2815 cabinet in each array. "I admit, we were really surprised at how perfectly it worked with so few cabinets," says Jakobsen. "Because it was the world music stage, the performers produced a lot of unusual instruments - a good test for the GEO T. The feedback we got was that this was the best-sounding of all the stages."
