Meyer Sound LEO headlines Outside Lands Festival

Meyer Sound’s LEO linear large-scale sound reinforcement system was recently deployed at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco, which saw such artists as Foo Fighters, Metallica, Neil Young and Stevie Wonder take to the main stage.

Over 100,000 festival goers converged on San Francisco for the event, with Meyer Sound’s LEO making its presence felt.

“Faithfully reproducing music for 65,000 is no easy task, but the Meyer Sound LEO system this year did an incredible job,” stated Gregg Perloff, CEO of event producer Another Planet Entertainment. “Legends like Neil Young and Stevie Wonder sounded better than I had ever heard them before, and LEO also made it easy for sound crews to do their job. LEO is definitely raising the bar for how live music should be appreciated.”

To cover the main audience area to a distance well past the first delay tower – over 275 feet from the stage – sound provider Pro Media/UltraSound of Hercules, California erected two main arrays of 15 LEO-M line array loudspeakers at one end of Golden Gate Park’s oval Polo Field. Meanwhile, equal levels of bass were priduced via side arrays of 12 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements and a centre grouping of ten 700-HP subwoofers, all in cardioid configurations. Six MICA line array loudspeakers were used as downfills under the LEO-M arrays, along with dual out fills of ten MICA loudspeakers each.

Big Mick Hughes, long-time FOH engineer for Metallica, mixed his first live show on a LEO system at this year’s Outside Lands. “The Metallica kick drum uses a considerable amount of high frequencies in order to create the attack required. There are parts in the show where the volume of the kick can hit a typical system’s high-frequency limiters. To my amazement this was not the case with LEO,” he explained. “LEO is such a unique animal. I think it’s a really exciting time for people to be able to hear things in this manner for the first time. LEO is going to make engineers expect more from all speaker systems.”

Two delay towers (a second at 500 feet) each held 16 MILO line array loudspeakers as dual hangs of eight, while CQ-1, CQ-2, MSL-4, and UPA-1P loudspeakers were deployed for, respectively, front fill, VIP stands, and a VIP tent. System drive and alignment were supplied by a Galileo Callisto loudspeaker management system with four Callisto 616 and two Galileo 616 processors.

Pro Media/UltraSound also provided a full complement of Meyer Sound MJF-212A stage monitors, dual hangs of five MILO loudspeakers per side as side fills with a pair of 700-HP subs, as well as the Avid D-Show FOH console used by numerous opening acts.

Additional headliner-supplied consoles included DiGiCo (SD5, SD7, and SD8), Midas (Heritage 3000, XL-8), and Yamaha PM-5D.

Derek Featherstone, Pro Media/UltraSound’s vice president of tour and rental division, headed technical planning and coordination. “We were all impressed with how quickly the system came together sonically and how much headroom there was,” said Featherstone. “With this amount of power, the 1100-LFC had no problem keeping up with the LEO-Mcabinets.”

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