Outline supplies sound for Summerfest’s Oasis Stage

Clearwing Productions provided a Outline GTO-based speaker system for the Miller Lite Oasis Stage at Summerfest 2013 in the US.

A plethora of artists and bands played the Wisconsin festival’s largest walk-up stage this year, including Dropkick Murphys, Diplo, Imagine Dragons, Leann Rimes and Nelly, and the Outline set-up proved to be more than capable of entertaining audiences of up to 15,000 people per show.

“Summerfest 2013 was our first experience with the Outline GTO system and I can say the sound quality was exceptional,” said Bryan Baumgardner, audio operations and logistics, Clearwing Productions. “We knew Outline was very good, but the system far exceeded our expectations and worked flawlessly. The GTO system was used to provide the sound for a wide variety of acts, such as country and electronic dance music, for example. That is hard to do and only found in the realm of the best systems.”

Commonly referred to as “The Big Gig” in the US, Summerfest features 11 stages, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Largest Music Festival,” pulling in between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people over 11 days every year.

“The GTO was fantastic and a pleasure to work with,” added Mike Grabarczyk, audio systems technician for Clearwing Productions. “It really is a top-notch system. We had a lot of engineers come through, many using it for the first time, and they loved the power and clarity. Others were excited to use the GTO once again.”

The Miller Lite Oasis Stage arrangement comprised nine GTO, one GTO-DF down fill and eight GTO-SUB subwoofer cabinets per side as the main FOH set-up, with four LIPF-082 Lip Fill cabinets used to even out coverage. Clearwing staff also utilised Outline’s OpenArray 3D simulation software to ensure each cabinet was properly aimed to maximise audience coverage.

“I think we really shocked every one of the audio professionals at the festival,” commented Tom Bensen, Sr. VP and managing director of Outline North America. “Beyond the intense clarity and high-definition of the GTO, the most impressive feature was the system’s headroom. We measured over 124dB C-Weighted at FOH, 80 feet from the array and we easily had 6dB or more additional headroom.”

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