AVNation TV

Tag: Touring Production

  • Loud & Clear Deploys Absen Jupiter Pro Series for Fast-Paced Festival Production

    Loud & Clear Deploys Absen Jupiter Pro Series for Fast-Paced Festival Production

    Danny Wimmer Presents’ (DWP) Sonic Temple Art & Music Festival, one of the nation’s premier hard rock and metal festivals, brings thousands of fans to Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus, Ohio, for four days of performances across multiple stages. With audiences filling the venue front to back, large-format LED displays are essential to giving every attendee a clear view of the action.

    To support the festival’s demanding production schedule, Concert Stuff Group’s (CSG) Loud & Clear selected Absen’s JP5 Pro from the Jupiter Pro Series. Designed specifically for touring applications, the Jupiter Pro Series combines rapid deployment, high-brightness performance and rugged reliability, helping production crews meet the compressed schedules and demanding conditions of large-scale outdoor festivals.

    For Loud & Clear, Absen’s Jupiter Pro Series became an essential extension of the live performance, keeping fans throughout the venue connected to the artists on stage.

    “At a festival like this, there are so many people here. This entire stadium is full,” said Corey Willard, head of video production for Loud & Clear. “The people in the back have to be able to see the bands performing. Primarily, they’re seeing that through the screens we’ve built, so it’s a super important part of the festival experience.”

    Sonic Temple marked Loud & Clear’s first deployment of the Jupiter Pro Series. For touring production companies, introducing a new LED platform requires confidence that it can withstand festival production, where crews have limited time to assemble large display systems safely before showtime.

    “The biggest challenges are that it has to go up fast, it has to come down fast, it has to go up safely and it has to look great in a variety of outdoor situations,” said Nick Thieme, general manager for Loud & Clear. “The JP5 went in super quickly. We were really impressed with how easy it went together.”

    Despite the scale of the deployment, Loud & Clear built out two stages — four IMAG walls and two upstage walls — in a single day.

    The Jupiter Pro Series’ large-format cabinets reduce the number of panels required and simplify installation, while lightweight composite construction makes the displays easier to transport and position. Precision locking technology and an integrated alignment feedback system create a stable, seamless surface across large-scale installations — reducing setup time without compromising structural integrity or image quality.

    Outdoor festivals present significant visual challenges. Throughout the day, displays must remain visible under changing weather conditions and direct sunlight while continuing to deliver the image quality required for both live audiences and camera systems. Maintaining brightness and contrast is essential to preserving the viewing experience from the front row to the back of the venue.

    “Brightness is very important because you’ll have the sun directly hitting the screens,” noted Willard. “If you can’t get bright enough to compete with the sun, you’re going to have a hard time seeing the content. They are excelling at the job they were created to do.”

    The Jupiter Pro Series delivers up to 5,000 nits of brightness with black LED technology that reduces surface reflections and improves contrast. Combined with 16-bit grayscale, a 7,680 Hz refresh rate and an 8,500:1 contrast ratio, the displays produce detailed, high-contrast imagery in bright outdoor environments while supporting live production and broadcast workflows.

    Reliability remained equally important throughout the deployment. Touring equipment is repeatedly transported, assembled, disassembled and shipped between venues, making long-term durability just as critical as visual performance. Even small equipment failures can increase maintenance requirements, delay productions and impact the audience experience.

    Willard said, “You can have the best-looking panels in the world that go up super quickly, but if they’re not reliable, if you’re constantly dealing with modules or pixels going out or power issues, it doesn’t matter. You need something that’s going to be robust enough to get you through the show and hopefully through many, many years. The JP5 panels are perfect for that.”

    By combining rapid installation, high-brightness performance and dependable operation, Absen’s Jupiter Pro Series helped Loud & Clear deliver the visual experience fans expect — and gives touring companies a display platform that performs consistently as they balance compressed schedules with growing audience expectations.

  • The Phil Collins Story Relies on DiGiCo and KLANG More Than One More Night

    The Phil Collins Story Relies on DiGiCo and KLANG More Than One More Night

    It’s a live show. It’s a film. It’s all of the above and then some. The Phil Collins Story, a docu-concert celebrating the life, career, and music of Academy Award, Grammy, and Golden Globe-winning performer and songwriter Phil Collins, debuted February 3 at the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse, New York and then embarked on a 50-city North American tour. Chronicling Collins’ chart-topping time from Genesis to his celebrated solo career, The Phil Collins Story brings the artist’s distinctive music to life in a way that resonates with audiences visually and emotionally, featuring state-of-the-art audio, dynamic projections, and intricate lighting.

    That audio for the show is delivered through a DiGiCo Quantum225 console, provided by Clair Global, managing both front-of-house and monitor duties, with the latter critically utilizing a DiGiCo DMI-KLANG card for signal distribution and control, paired with iPads running KLANG:app for the musicians on stage.

    “It’s not really a film or just a concert—it’s a multimedia experience with live music,” explains Theodore “Ted” Woolsey, who did the sound design and mixes the live sound for the project, working with A2 Ethan Ginsburg-Margo. “It’s the story of Phil’s life and it goes through a lot of the stories and all the hits, including with Genesis, with live musicians onstage. It’s pretty spectacular.”

    The show is true to Collins’ unique sonic signatures, including the Sennheiser 421 microphones that captured his iconic heavily-gated tom-tom fills on songs like “In the Air Tonight.” Woolsey also points out that the show is live in more ways than one: while a click track is used for the musicians, the entire production is, like much of Collins’ own career, very analog: sound, lighting, and video all operate independently of each other, relying on their respective managing engineers to keep the show together.

    “The show starts with the music director running a Logic session with a click track off of his laptop next to his keyboard,” he explains. “That goes to the six musicians in the band through the KLANG:app on their iPads, and it also cues the lighting and video operators, who have their own KLANG mix as well as the click. When they hear the click, they start the show manually.”

    The DiGiCo Quantum225 console is the hub for all of this, paired with some choice, authentically-vintage Phil Collins outboard gear like Bricasti reverbs and the Yamaha SPX2000 multi-effects processor, as well as some more modern Waves plugins.

    “The Q225 lets me manage everything easily from a single surface,” he says. “And I designed the setup so that there’s no need for a monitor engineer—I’m using KLANG so that the musicians can mix themselves. The intuitive KLANG:app interface makes personal mixing easy for them, while the immersive mix engine helps them find the right balance much more quickly.”

    “It’s really cool how I can split up audio in so many different places through so many different ‘languages,’ like through MADI, Cat5, and over fiber,” Woolsey adds. “In this case, the whole system is one Cat5 line with the DMI-KLANG card out of the console into an access point that drives all the iPads. Typically, if you were going to split up monitors, you’d have to have a split snake where you would drive all the inputs in a secondary way into another rack that goes and distributes into the in-ears. But with the DMI-KLANG, it’s all shared off a single SD-Rack, so there’s no split. It’s all digital through the one Cat5 line. That’s it, that’s the whole system—there’s no split snake rack, no networking rack. It’s just shared off the same I/O and it’s all going through this access point into the KLANG.” The simplicity of the signal path, he adds, contributes greatly to reducing the potential for any failure.

    In addition, the entire show is programmed with snapshots so that during the initial rehearsals each of the musicians dialed in all of their individual mix levels per song. “Then I saved that data with the snapshots, so when I hit the next song, it changes their mix automatically to the mix that they dialed in for each song,” he says. “The combination of the Quantum and the KLANG is like having a monitor engineer that knows the whole show, but each musician is handling it themselves. And I like giving control to the musicians; they can easily make their own monitor tweaks through KLANG:app, focus on their playing, and be fully immersed in the show. And that also lets me focus on the live show and my front-of-house mix. Really, it’s the best way this show could be done.”

  • Texas Trust CU Theatre Continues to Trust in L-Acoustics with New K2 System

    Texas Trust CU Theatre Continues to Trust in L-Acoustics with New K2 System

    Since first opening in 2002, Texas Trust CU Theatre at Grand Prairie has seen a variety of name changes: Texas ShowPlace, NextStage Performance Theater, Nokia Live, Verizon Theatre, and its current moniker, after Texas Trust Credit Union acquired the venue’s naming rights in 2021. However, one thing that has remained constant is the 6,350-capacity live performance hall’s commitment to delivering amazing-sounding concerts and shows, thanks in large part to an L-Acoustics V-DOSC loudspeaker system installed there by Onstage Systems more than a decade ago. Now, to best maintain that same commitment for the next ten-plus years, the city-owned and AEG-operated indoor theatre has upgraded its audio facilities with a modern L-Acoustics K2 concert sound system.

    “When looking for a new PA, L-Acoustics was the first contender on a very short list, and it was a very brief deliberation before deciding to stick with the ‘sure thing’ and a proven track record that is accepted on every rider,” says Tyler Johnston, Dallas Operations Manager for LD Systems, a Clair Global brand, which acquired Onstage’s equipment inventories earlier this year. “The venue’s V-DOSC system continued to deliver solid performance after more than a decade of service. However, as touring acts increasingly arrived with K2 systems, upgrading to match current industry standards became the logical next step—allowing the venue to offer seamless integration while maintaining the L-Acoustics reliability they’d come to trust.”

    Working with L-Acoustics Soundvision and the manufacturer’s Application team, Johnston designed the new system, which now features main arrays of 12 K2 per side, each backed by a hang of six KS28 subwoofers in a cardioid configuration. These are augmented by four KS21 subs on each side of the stage, located below the mains, while coaxial X8i are spread out across the stage lip as front-fills.

    L-Acoustics A15 enclosures are deployed for a center vocal array, as well as wide/out-fill arrays, with eight more A15 clusters flown from a delay ring addressing the upper balcony seating area. The entire PA is powered by LA7.16i amplified controllers, aside from the subs, which are LA12X-driven. The system also features a P1 processor and LS10 Milan-AVB front end that is fully redundant. For stage monitoring, the venue now offers a collection of X15 HiQ wedges and A15/KS21 side-fills, while a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 FOH and monitor consoles round out the new gear complement.

    The Soundvision design’s final result is a system that offers across-the-board improvements in power, fidelity, dispersion, and physical size. “We went from 15 boxes in the previous system to 12 per side, because of the vertical and horizontal coverage pattern of K2, and still got better coverage,” Johnston notes. “Single-box resolution on the LA7.16i amplified controllers allowed for optimal filtering from the top to the bottom of the arrays, providing very even coverage and tonal response throughout the venue. The delay ring is quite robust and those ‘cheap seats’ actually sound great now with overlapping A15 clusters hitting every inch of the balcony, while still getting some of the power and ‘feel’ from the big K2 and KS28 arrays at the stage.”

    Johnston proudly reports that he’s already heard numerous positive comments about the “consistency of coverage and how there are no longer any bad-sounding seats,” he says. “And, of course, the rider acceptance is great. When your tech pack reads ‘K2 PA, X15 wedges, and Quantum338 desks’, there’s no pushback from any touring artist. The cost and hassle savings of not having to constantly negotiate removing house gear has been a huge boost to their operations, and their new K2 setup was absolutely the right choice for them moving forward.”

    For Amanda West, AEG Presents’ Director of Production, the new system’s enhancements in fidelity and coverage were immediately noticeable. “The sound quality in the balcony and far reaches of the theater is striking—every patron is truly hearing the same concert,” she says. “Another big plus is that touring engineers are all really pleased with what we have to offer and enjoy mixing their shows in our space.”

    Roger Gates, the venue’s Operations Manager for AEG Presents, also appreciates K2’s sonic performance. “Alan Parsons played a concert here, and it sounded absolutely amazing!” he enthuses. “Alan is known for his studio magic and attention to detail when it comes to sound and the listening audience’s experience, and he did not disappoint when he performed on our new system. It was probably as close to his studio sound as you can possibly get, and both our guests and staff were floored by the quality of the audio.”

    “And there are many other similar examples,” he continues. “Dwight Yoakam played a great show, and his acoustic guitar was bright and up front in the mix. More recently, we hosted tribute act Brit Floyd, and the room sounded incredible with everything you’d expect from listening to Pink Floyd’s music. All of the details were clear and bright, with no muddiness or loss of fidelity. One could have easily confused the sound for a high-quality, well-mixed live recording. That’s a huge compliment, not only to the band and their engineer, but also our new K2 system, which delivers excellent sound quality throughout the entire theatre with no dead spots or gaps, even in the highest corners of the space.”