JBL and Crown make impact at Coachella
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This year, the festival occurred over two weekends and brought approximately 250,000 people to the Empire Polo Club in the Coachella Valley. This year also marked the festival’s return after a two-year hiatus, with a line-up including Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and Swedish House Mafia with The Weeknd as headliners.
The mid-size Gobi stage hosted a diverse bill of artists including electro-pop singer Rina Sawayama, alt-jazz combo BADBADNOTGOOD and masked country star Orville Peck among many others. To best accommodate a variety of genres and give the audience an immersive experience uninhibited by noise from the other festival stages, the Rat Sound team implemented a rig featuring JBL Professional VTX Series speakers and Crown VRack Series amplifiers.
“There are a lot of artists on the Gobi stage with a lot of dynamic and unique sounds,” says Kyle Pace, project manager, Rat Sound. “The main challenge at this stage is the tent structure and sound slapping from the back structures out in the field and sides of the tent. The JBL engineers came in and listened to the requests of what we were trying to accomplish. Using their smaller-degree boxes on top and the wides on bottom definitely helped minimise slap-back from the rear structures and sides of the tent. The JBL system did a phenomenal job at projecting a clear and accurate representation of what was going in and out of the console.”
Using the streamlined rigging technology found across VTX Series speakers, the team designed two main speaker clusters each consisting of 10 JBL VTX A12 and two A12W line array speakers.
“It’s so exciting to be back at Coachella, especially after the pandemic - t’s especially nice to be mixing on the VTX A12 PA,” said Anna Dahlin, FOH for Rina Sawayama. “It gives me all the clarity I need for a predominantly electronic show like Rina Sawayama, plus a solid sub to underpin the dance element of the music.”
Along with the A12 speakers, the Rat Sound team installed 15 JBL VTX B28 dual 18-inch subwoofers, which are designed to complement the rest of the VTX Series speakers with reinforced, transparent low end.
“The drivers on the VTX speakers have a lot of clarity, precision and intelligibility,” said Pace. “I was able to make out and hear a lot of sounds that get buried inside of tracks. The consistency of the PA walking side to side and back to front was a breath of fresh air.”
“The VTX solutions deployed on Gobi were both musical and powerful,” noted Bill May, FOH for electronic artist TokiMonsta. “For my client on a festival stage with highly-produced tracks, it is very important to have heaps of headroom and a musical PA right out of the box. I was really impressed with this system and I’m excited to see it out on the road.”
For the backend, Rat Sound selected Crown VRack Series Amplifiers to provide ample power and optimum performance. Both the 4x3500HD and 12000HD amplifiers are all-in-one solutions for touring shows of any size, packing intuitive controls and reliable inputs into a compact and tour-ready enclosure. Lastly, JBL Performance Manager software provided the Gobi front-of-house with comprehensive, easy-to-use controls and a streamlined layout for programming, automation and more.
