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Meyer Sound M Series Systems Keep Island Hopping at Sziget Festival
During one week in mid-August, more than 385,000 visitors poured onto wooded Óbudai Island in the Danube River near Budapest, Hungary, to enjoy Central Europe's largest music and arts event: the 13th annual Sziget Festival. This year's edition of the festival set new records at nearly every turn, with the highest overall and single-day attendances in the event's history. Daytime activities included a variety of cultural and entertainment attractions for all ages, but as evening fell the biggest crowds massed in the two largest outdoor venues, the Main Stage and the Pannon GSM World Music Stage, to hear stellar lineups of international music stars — more than 170 performers from abroad, in addition to the scores of Hungarian acts on the bills — through powerful Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeaker systems. The Main Stage drew the biggest crowds of the week, with up to 40,000 fans packing the audience area to hear headliners like Franz Ferdinand, Korn, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. With required throw distances of over 100 meters, Hungarian rental company Expander 2000, primary system provider for the stage, fielded hangs consisting of six M3D line array loudspeakers, 14 MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers and one MILO 120 high-power expanded coverage curvilinear array loudspeaker on each side. Thundering bass power was supplied by a dozen 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers per side. A total of ten MSL-4 horn-loaded long-throw loudspeakers were deployed to fill the needs for a center cluster, frontfill, and a side hang to cover an asymmetric portion of the audience area. "The MILOs gave us broad horizontal coverage, a very smooth pattern, and amazingly clear highs," says Meyer Sound European Technical Support Representative Károly Molnár, who assisted Expander with the system design. "With the system coupling to the 700-HPs for the low end, it was killer. We had crispy highs and plenty of punch more than 120 meters from the stage." The World Music Stage hosted an exotic mix of musical acts from four continents, including Youssou N'Dour, Mory Kante, and the Klezmatics, playing to audiences of up to 15,000. János Kiss of Budapest-based Omega Sound and Light, sound providers for the stage, collaborated with Támas Dóra of Chromatica, Ltd. on the system design. The resulting design handled the stylistically broad material with left and right flown arrays of two M3D-Sub directional subwoofers, five M3D cabinets, and one MILO 120 unit each. To guarantee sufficient low end, three more M3D-Subs were groundstacked on each side, while five UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers were deployed for frontfill. Omega's president, Károly Frenreisz, assisted at the FOH mix station and circulated through the crowd with a sound level meter, checking both crowd reactions and system coverage. "I asked people at random about the sound, and found they were very satisfied with what they were hearing," he reports. "We also received congratulations from many of the bands' FOH engineers. But that's not surprising, since I've noticed that more than eighty percent of the riders now list the Meyer Sound M3D and MILO arrays – that's far more than any single competitor." By lending power and clarity to the music of 48 different acts, while energizing audiences approaching a quarter-million, the two Meyer Sound systems certainly helped cement the growing reputation of the Sziget Festival. "The systems performed very well and with no problems," concludes Molnár, "and we made some converts. We had several engineers who hadn't used MILO before, and they went away just loving it." Although the music concerts were by far the biggest draw, the sprawling island offered 62 different program sites with more than 200 separate programs scheduled each day. More than 120 different organizations were involved in the festival, which incidentally is named after the Hungarian word for "island". September, 2005 |
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