Camarillo, California-based Rat Sound Systems provided a full 360 degrees of audio
coverage for Bassnectar’s New Year’s Eve show in Birmingham, Alabama. The
concert, which was held at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Centre (BJCC)
Legacy Arena, featured 72 Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW) Anya modules flown in
four double-wide clusters.
Bassnectar is well-known for his live performances, massive sound systems and
light shows. Bassnectar NYE360, now in its fifth year, features a rotating stage at
the centre of the arena designed to deliver maximum impact to his fans. The
Legacy Arena seats up to 19,000 and was completely sold out for the event.
“After adapting Anya to Red Rocks in Colorado and now using it 360 degrees at
BJCC – the system continues to amaze me,’ says Jason Decter, FOH engineer for
Bassnectar. “It has such power and hi-fi clarity. It was no problem to evenly cover
the entire venue with a high SPL. It’s really impressive.’
Rat Sound Systems President Dave Rat has been working with Bassnectar as a
sound consultant for the last year. As such, he was brought in to design a sound
system with some unique challenges for Bassnectar NYE360.
Not only did the system need to be optimized for 360-degree arena coverage, but it
was important that it did not block sight lines or distract from the beautiful, intense
visuals. Plus, it had to cover the entire arena as smoothly and uniformly as
possible.
“Achieving 360-degree coverage from a conventional line array system is not overly
challenging if one is willing to hang five or more clusters,’ explains Rat. “The
problem is that one cannot physically put two conventional, “J’ shaped line array
hangs next to each other – pointed in different directions – without leaving space
between them. If you don’t, you get undesirable interference when the same signal
is sent to both arrays. To deal with the interference, the arrays need to be
physically separated, which creates a space problem. The amount of sight line
blockage of video screens can be an issue with that type of set-up.’
For Bassnectar NYE360 the video screens in the arena scoreboard were incorporated
as a central video source for the performance. With this in mind, Rat knew that if
he could place sound arrays at the four corners of the square scoreboard, he could
minimize sight line blockage. However, in order to cover the venue smoothly and
uniformly, each of the four sound arrays would need a relatively wide coverage and
would need to be flown in a fairly limited vertical space.
The final design consisted of four Anya clusters made up of a column of eleven
modules hung next to a column of seven modules. Each cluster was then positioned
in the corners of the scoreboard for highly uniform coverage of the arena.
