UK - With its origins in the celebrated MiNT Club in Leeds, MiNT Festival is Yorkshire’s biggest dance music event. The festival, which evolved from a collection of local gatherings, takes place near the city on a purpose-built arena at the 130-acre Newsam Farm, attracting thousands of Leeds music lovers to its multiple stages.
Now a prominent event in the UK festival calendar, MiNT’s reputation was further enhanced by this year’s edition which featured Josh Baker's You&Me, Morgan Seatree's Unfussy, plus Patrick Topping, Kettama, East End Dubs, and more. East Anglia-based Audio Plus provided sound across the site.
More than 30 years in the business has seen Audio Plus become a widely trusted partner for touring, festivals, special events, and installations, and the company has taken care of MiNT since its inception. This was the ninth edition and saw Audio Plus covering five stages, including DJ monitoring, and a backstage VIP system. Each system was comprised of Funktion-One loudspeakers and XTA amplification, a combination which Audio Plus has relied on for many years.
Tino Reschke of Audio Plus reflects on another successful event: “We used a Funktion-One large format Vero system, two Vero VX systems in extra wide dispersion and four point arrangements, and our new Funktion-One Evolution 2 and Evolution X setups, which enabled us to deliver a cutting-edge sound experience across the festival.
“All the systems were powered and controlled efficiently by XTA’s latest DSP amplifier technology. We’ve used XTA and MC² amplifiers since the 1990s and recently transitioned to exclusive use of the XTA DPA100 for all our work.”
Audio Plus deployed 25 x XTA DPA100 Dante equipped amplifiers for all types of Funktion-One loudspeakers at MiNT. As a large multi-stage event sited close to the urban population, the festival requires precise control of noise emissions, as Tino explains:
“Using large bass stacks with good inherent directivity helps to keep the bass focused onto the audience area. Further, on one stage we implemented rear-facing F124 subs with cardioid subwoofer array settings, which we could then fine-tune from outside the festival grounds using a WiFi remote control of the globcon drive system.
“The precise and present sound character of Funktion-One loudspeakers helps with keeping noise levels to a minimum, as great impact can be achieved even at low levels, and the XTA DSP platform's flexibility on different filters and the ability to swap filter types while in place really helps with adjusting directional bass arrays efficiently.”
The Audio Plus team have become accustomed to trouble-free performance from this tried and trusted combination, and MiNT Festival ran as smoothly as expected. Tino continues:
“There were no problems at all – everything performed reliably. We always run our sound systems with analogue backup, which the XTA DPA amplifiers allow us to use in combination with Dante digital audio networking – so even if there was an issue in the digital audio network, we would have a safe fallback mechanism. The front panel control of the amplifiers is especially convenient on smaller stages such as Resident and VIP at MiNT Festival, giving us the ability to flexibly control a stand-alone system, without the need for networking and connecting a laptop or tablet.”
Another busy summer beckons for Audio Plus. During MiNT Festival, another of its teams was simultaneously delivering the Funktion-One/XTA combination for two stages at Mixology’s UNDER event in Peterborough, with Glastonbury’s Glade area the next high-profile setting in the diary.
XTA’s Rich Fleming comments: “The Audio Plus team continues to make maximum use of the quality and reliability offered by our DPA Series, and we’re very proud to see our products performing in the thick of the action, successfully supporting challenging multi-stage events like MiNT.”