Outline’s GTO loudspeaker system was used across the Main Stage and ASP Stage at the 32nd Pol’and’Rock festival, which calls itself the “Most Beautiful Festival in the World”. The free-entry event took place on a former military airfield at Broczyno, in Western Pomerania, Poland.
The festival was created in 1995 as a thank-you to the volunteers of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOŚP), a public organisation aiming to support and improve medical care in public hospitals nationwide. The festival has never charged for admission, and is built on the three words that have been its motto for three decades – Love, Friendship, Music.
Rental company GigantSound – Letus, which describes itself as Europe’s largest holder of Outline GTO inventory, deployed 350 loudspeaker elements in total, 50 more than last year, following the purchase of further GTO modules and flown GTO-SUB cabinets.
The complement foe the festival, held from July 30 to August 1, comprised 72 GTO line-array modules with eight GTO-DF downfill units, 56 GTO C-12 enclosures, 64 Superfly compact line-array modules, 50 Mantas cabinets and 100 sub-bass elements, made up of GTO-SUB and DBS 18-2 units. The audio chain was based on Outline’s Newton FPGA-based signal processor and its WFIR (Warped Finite Impulse Response) zero-latency filtering, with the aim of keeping one sonic signature from the stage to the far field.
On the Main Stage, the system was deployed from ten positions in a main left/right plus outfill left/right configuration, with two delay zones, frontfill, infill and FOH delay. Low frequencies were handled by cabinets in a cardioid configuration, forming a line 80m long. Signal distribution ran over a Dante network using two Newton processors, one on stage and one at FOH, which took feeds from the bands’ consoles and acted as the main matrix. The link between them used Dante over fibre, with analogue redundancy.
The open airfield brought strong wind, heat on most days and heavy rain on the final night, while the bill ran from metal and reggae to hip-hop, folk and stadium rock on the same rig.
Jurek ‘Gigant’ Taborowski, system designer, GigantSound – Letus said: “This festival takes place in the open space of an airfield, where there is always a great deal of wind, and that is precisely why the Outline system works so well here: it is considerably more resistant to gusts. There are also no barriers in front of the stage, because the stage front has to be a single unbroken wall – so the sub-bass cabinets are hidden beneath it and, across a stage some 80m wide, you end up with a continuous line of single subs that is almost impossible to control. An electronic arc was essential. Our system engineers dealt with it: the lowest frequencies, at very high power, stayed coherent in tone and even in dynamics across the entire site.”
Jakub Mikołajczak, chief system engineer and FOH engineer, added: “The challenge is to design and tune the rig so that, across an enormous festival site, it sounds like one coherent system – full bandwidth, high dynamics and intelligibility at every point of the planned area. Carrying the energy of the music hundreds and hundreds of metres: that is exactly what this is about.”
Max Burditt, FOH engineer for Kosheen, added: “Honestly, I had such a fun time with the GTO system; the guys at the festival did an amazing job deploying it. It was my first time working with Outline, but when I pulled up my showfile at soundcheck, the band all reacted with huge smiles on their faces, and when showtime came, that energy translated to the 150,000+ people in the crowd in a really emotional way. It felt like it was voiced with my taste in mind, with headroom, tight low, and mix depth for days. Like a giant pair of studio monitors, when can I have a go again?”
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