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Goodlife Festival scales up to Martin Audio WPL system with dBS Solutions

Goodlife Festival at Harewood House in Leeds, UK, built on the sell-out success of its inaugural event last year, returning in June with an increased capacity to welcome up to 10,000 festival-goers. With a main stage line-up including Armand Van Helden, Groove Armada, Alison Limerick, Roger Sanchez, and Inner City, event production specialist dBS Solutions deployed a Martin Audio WPL line array system.

Initially slated for a WPC system, the rapid growth in ticket sales prompted dBS to upgrade the system design. “When the capacity increased, we re-examined the site”, says Chris Bogg, Director, dBS Solutions. “Martin Audio’s Display software allowed me to show the client, ‘Look, you’ve opened up this audience area. If you want it to sound consistent, we’re going to need a delay tower, and we might need to look at making the main hang WPL instead of WPC’.”

With an audience area approaching 100 metres, the final system comprised front hangs of ten Martin Audio WPL array elements per side, paired with a castle-wall cardioid sub-array of fourteen SXH218 subs. To ensure seamless coverage to the back of the site, a single delay tower of six Martin Audio WPC array elements was deployed, including a cardioid-configured stack of three SXH subs. 

Ground-stacked Martin Audio Torus T1230 outfills covered the sides, while Martin Audio FP12s sat on top of the castle-wall sub-array as front-fills. On stage, the monitoring package featured Martin Audio XE300 wedges, with DJ-fills consisting of two SXC subs with an FP15 FlexPoint Series cabinet on each side of the performer.

Managing noise limits across the site required close cooperation, with Bogg describing a highly collaborative approach between artists, engineers, and the on-site noise management team throughout the event. “The noise management team would come back and forth to check on other tents, and if we were approaching the limit, we’d back it down a decibel or two”, he says. “We would check in before the headliners went on to see what headroom we had left before hitting any off-site noise.”

This year dBS is celebrating its twentieth anniversary in business. The company also has established a long-standing partnership with Martin Audio. “Our journey with Martin Audio has progressed from smaller boxes like WPM and WPS to WPC and WPL, allowing us to scale up to these large-scale festivals”, reports Bogg. “What really sealed it for us when we bought our first optimisable array was the scalable resolution.”

“As a rental company, that means I can own a pool of amplifiers and deploy them at one-box resolution on a high-stakes gig where we need absolute off-site noise control, or run them at two-box resolution for a standard gig and use the remaining amplifier channels to run a second system on another site”, he adds.

(Photos: Martin Audio/NckPix)

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