The concert, the brainchild and put together by George Walker Events to raise funds for the Anthony Nolan Trust for Leukaemia, featured a north of the border flavour - Fiona Kennedy, The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra, The Graham Geddes Scottish Dance Band, Mass Pipes and Drums, Celtic Scottish Dancers, the highlight of the evening being a stunning performance by renowned classical singer Katherine Jenkins. Presented by BBC2's Ken Bruce, the concert was attended by a crowd of over 5,500 people and lasted over a five hour period, including a spectacular fireworks display and an air display by the 2Excel Blades aviation team.
Harrogate based FT Audio Visual Ltd provided the sound and light production with owner Rick Lawson at the helm of the KV2 Audio VHD sound system. As an experienced user of KV2 speaker systems the decision to utilise their new VHD system was not a difficult one. Lawson heard the VHD system at the recent Frankfurt Pro Light & Sound exhibition this year, where it featured in the Live Sound Forum outdoors in a comparison to competitor's line arrays.
Lawson says: "In Frankfurt the VHD system was stunning; I've never really heard anything quite like it, clarity, coverage, it was all there and it's so physically small in comparison to other systems. I knew instantly it was the system to use for Balmoral."
The 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.
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 6 MHz sampling rate.
Nominal dispersion for the VHD 2.0 is 80 degrees horizontal and 40 degrees 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 2.0's are arrayed vertically, horizontal dispersion is maintained while vertical dispersion is lowered to less than 10 degrees. System response is 25 Hz to 20 kHz depending on the subwoofers selected, says the company.
After consulting with Andy Austin-Brown of KV2, it was decided to utilise a system configuration of just two flown VHD 2.0 mid/high cabinets per side and a ground stacked mix of four VHD 4.18 subs and two VHD 2.15 subs per side, powered by a total of 8 VHD amplifiers.
Lawson recalls arriving on site for the first time, "When I arrived, I was not surprised to see and hear the expressions of several of the experienced event organisers questioning the supposed small amount of PA that appeared to be available, however this quickly changed to acceptance and wide smiles once the system was switched on and the first sound checks came through. In fact the only problem we encountered during sound check was a bit of 'slap-back' off a mountainside over a mile away! So we turned it down a little!"
Throughout the evening the system was monitored to ensure that the coverage was maintained during the seemingly constant increase in audience numbers, making the expected listening area ever wider and deeper. Nevertheless, the organisers were happy to report that not one single complaint had been received from the paying public with regards to the sound.
KV2 Audio products are distributed in the UK by KV2 Audio Europe from new premises in Harrogate, details as follows:
KV
