Festival braves the rain with EV

The Sonnenrot Festival takes place in Eching, near Munich and attracts more than 13,000 people over two days. This year, lighting and sound production for the event was handled by rental company Magic Event- & Medientechnik.

The line-up included acts such as Jan Delay, Maximo Park, 2Raumwohnung, Donuts, and Danko Jones. To spare festival-goers long pauses between acts, the organisers erected two stages for the occasion.

A team of sound engineers led by company MD Markus Thomae chose sound reinforcement systems from Electro-Voice.

At the Sonnenrot Festival, the EV systems had to be resilient and weather-resistant. “Despite the name ‘Sonnenrot’ [‘Sonne’ means ‘sun’ in German], the eponymous hero of the piece this year failed to show up,” joked Thomae. “On Friday, the weather was simply appalling, with pouring rain, wind, and even lightning. Jan Delay had to stop midway through his set for safety reasons.” However the wiring proved fully weatherproof and the Electro-Voice PA system impervious to the heavy rain.

On one stage the Electro-Voice XLC system comprised 2 x 3 XLC215 array elements, 2 x 3 XLC 907 DVX, and 2 x 9 XLC127. Eighteen Xsubs provided additional SPL in the low frequency range, and 14 x EV TG5 and 6 x EV TG7 amplifiers the requisite power. On the second stage Thomae’s team opted for a compact Electro-Voice XLD line-array system, with twelve XLD281 enclosures per side, on a foundation, again, of EV Xsubs (nine this time) driven by 10 x TG5 amps.

The IRIS-Net software platform and RCM-26 dual-channel digital control modules also played an important role in the production. The software made it easy for the sound crew to control and supervise the performance of the entire system via a simple interface. “This allowed us to continuously oversee the performance of each link in the signal chain, as well as intervene at any moment to tweak whatever parameters we liked,” explains Thomae. “Having that degree of control is extremely reassuring.”

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