Britannia Row Productions supplied an L-Acoustics system for Kasabian at Victoria Park in Leicester.

The main arrays comprised a combination of L-Acoustic K1s and L-Acoustic K1SBs and L Acoustic K2s were used on side hangs. Forty-eight L-Acoustic SB28 Subs were ground stacked along the front of the stage. Out on the site there were eight delay towers placed strategically rather than symmetrically across the audience area; each one flew six V-Dosc and four Subs respectively.

Kasabian’s FOH engineer since 2011 is Paul Ramsay: “I choose L-Acoustic speakers as I’ve loved the sound of them ever since first hearing V-Dosc back in 1999. In more recent years we have toured with the K1 with great results and this has become almost an industry standard on any large festival system. For this show at Victoria Park, I held discussions with Warren from the acoustic consultants Vanguardia to consider how we could maintain a good on-site SPL but still respect the off-site limit of 73dba due to the park being surrounded by residential housing. That was back in November: in January, Josh Lloyd of Special Projects from Britrow did a site visit and a prediction with L-Acoustic Soundvision for a proposed PA to cover the site. I had a look over it as did my system tech Adam Smith and with a few tweaks we had the system that we’ve used on the day.”

Ramsay had to find a way of avoiding spill off-site without compromising the band’s performance. “The band require a lot of energy in the lows and sub area so we made sure that on the main system we had plenty! It was important that the whole field got the complete sound experience so we added subs on the delay arrays as well. We ended up with a total of 80 SB28 Subs which one could say is a lot but when I walked the field we had a nice even coverage of sub everywhere which can sometimes not be the case at these large scale events.”

Delay towers played a significant role in creating total and even coverage for the whole site as Ramsay continues, “Project manager, Lez Dwight, and Josh Lloyd decided on the delay design; any less than eight would have sacrificed coverage on such a wide audience space and we wanted to give everyone a similar SPL to what I was getting at FOH. To balance the asymmetry of the site we hung different numbers of cabinets on the side hangs and, on house left in particular where houses were very close by, we kept spill to an absolute minimum by keeping the boxes on the tightest dispersion.”

For control, Ramsay’s desk of choice was a DiGiCo SD7.

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