This year, long-time Primavera audio provider Twin Cam Audio specified L-Acoustics for five of the festival's seven stages. Right from the beginning, Twin Cam's technical director, Juan Cid worked hand in hand with L-Acoustics touring application engineer Frédéric Bailly, to jointly design all five stages.
Twin Cam chose Primavera to debut their newly acquired compact and lightweight K2 audio system. K1 along with K2 provided the one-two audio punch enabling them to offer a more powerful, accurate and versatile system than previously.
The core main stage setup (Sony Stage) was flown with Left/Right arrays of 12 K1 and four K1-SB per side. Two hangs of six K1, two K1-SB and three Kara provided out-fill, 10 Kara for front-fill, while K2 was used for L/R delays and 22 SB28s provided low end reinforcement. Four ARCS II with a pair of SB28 subs were used for stage side-fill. The entire system was powered using LA8 amplifiers.
Rafael Campos, director and owner of Twin Cam was impressed with how K2 improved sound performance and setup. "It delivers an identical sonic performance to K1 in a more compact footprint. K2 is lightweight, so it's very quick and easy to get onstage and ready to go," he reports. "Primavera imposes a strict limit of 102dB at FOH, so our big challenge is to maximise those dBs at every point where there are spectators. K1 and K2 together allow us to cover the festival with the most homogenous response possible and so we get to deliver superb audio to festival-goers, whilst keeping the neighbours happy."
For the ATP Stage (second stage), two hangs of 14 K2 were deployed per side, complemented by six K1-SB with Kudo for out-fills and delays. Additional stages (Vice and Pitchfork) used two complete Kara systems and the Heineken Hidden stage boasted an ARCS Wide and Focus system.
"The systems are designed, weighing every detail, to cover crowd areas like a glove," Campos continued. "Before the show, we used L-Acoustics Soundvision to predict how sound would feel in all corners of each of the five stages, allowing us to get optimal performance out of all our rigs."
(Jim Evans)
