Powersoft delivered 720,000 watts of audio to more than 18,000 music fans at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards, held at Los Angeles’ Staples Center last week, in addition to a viewership of more than 24 million people around the world.

ATK Audiotek was on hand to set up and deliver audio services for the gala event, which has been held at the Staples Center for sixteen of the last seventeen years. Over the course of "music’s biggest night", 72 Powersoft K10 amplifiers, situated in a dozen racks located around the venue, delivered “reliable, smooth” audio — powering all the stage monitoring, front fills and upper level seating areas. With LL Cool J hosting, Grammy Awards were bestowed on Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Alabama Shakes and Meghan Trainor, who scooped up "Best New Artist."

With two principal active stages in front of the venue, in addition to a dish stage near front of house, the Powersoft K10s provided a monitoring power to the system’s side fills, wedges and drum fills. Speakers consisted of (2) ATK C6 cabinets per side, (4) ATK M5 wedges across the front of the stage, a drum subwoofer consisting of an ATK CSW218 dual 18” speaker with an ATK M5 on top, and various ATK M2s — which were dispersed and placed according to the various artist needs throughout the evening.

The amplifier manufacturer’s Armonia DSP system played an integral role in set up and room tuning, since ATK was able to leverage DSP pre-sets from Grammy Award events held at the Staples Center, explained Mikael Stewart, ATK Audiotek’s VP of special events: "We can easily call up previous years and previous show settings from this venue, fire them up and be ready to go," he said. "This saves a ton of time because we don’t have to start from scratch when we are tuning a room, and of course time is at a premium."

Despite the convenience of set up, Stewart asserted that reliability is the single, defining factor for a high-profile event such as the Grammy Awards: "We are never concerned about a Powersoft failure, and they have proven to be extremely reliable,” he said. "The fact that we can get so much power into a 6U rack is always a consideration and a definite saving.”

Stewart added that the Powersoft K10 is a ‘very smooth sounding amp’, and that the addition of Armonia software only ‘adds to the cache of Powersoft’.

http://www.powersoft-audio.com/en/