10,000
fans pack Groningen\’s Vismarkt Square for the traditional Queen’s Day,
amplified by Outline GTO and DBS 18-2 sub systems
Queen\’s Day – or Koninginnedag – is celebrated
every year on April 30th and is considered Hollands’s most exciting
party. It’s above all the opportunity for the Dutch (and not only them) let
themselves go. Music, dancing and rivers of beer fill the streets.
Queen\’s Day lasts 48 hours: it begins on April 29th,
runs non-stop all day on the 30th (the official Queen’s Day) and ends
on the morning of May 1st. This year’s celebrations were two-fold,
since Queen Beatrix abdicated in favour of her son, Prince Willem-Alexander.
In the city of Groningen the celebrations were held
at the Vismarkt square with its difficult acoustics, notoriously feared amongst
rental companies, due to its small width (40 metres) compared to
the length (100 metres),
and its strict SPL regulation of no more than 85 dB (measured) at the buildings
at the side of the square.
Also, the limited height of the PA towers meant an
almost impossible task was required to deliver an equal SPL to at least 85% of
the designated area. According to the sound engineers involved, the GTO
line-source system being used made an incredible job of overcoming these
problems and delivered a truly remarkable performance.
The L+R FOH system was composed of nine+nine
Outline GTO, 1+1 GTO-DF (Down-fill), sixteen DBS 18-2 subwoofers and six
Lipfill 082 compact enclosures – Outline’s latest addition to the GTO family of
products, designed to complement the GTO-DF, providing the critical front/lip
fill coverage for the first rows. All the above was powered by twenty-four T-11
amplifiers, also from Outline.
The organising office stated: “It\’s been the first year that we\’ve served
the public area: we were able to fully perceive the singers, loud and clear.
The low-end sounded unbelievably powerful yet never annoying”.
Erik Koster of Eko Geluid & lichttechniek,
providing the stage equipment, stated: “When
we fired up the system I knew that it was great. With all the limits the
location did set, we still were able to deliver seamless coverage. The headroom
at our disposal was simply astounding”.
Axel Nagtegaal of The Audio Specialists, Outline’s
distributor for Benelux and Germany, stated: “Currently, thanks also to the evolution of a market on which
loudspeakers are increasingly sturdy and efficient, there is no doubt that
almost all PAs effectively sound ‘loud’. One certain GTO prerogative is the
ability to ensure intelligible output over long distances: in my opinion higher
than any competitor in the market’s large-format PA sector”.
