Prolite Event Services rocks the warm-up show with our new line array
It’s a jubilee year for the Bang Your Head festival with 2018 marking this metal extravaganza’s 20th outing. Born in 1999, the open-air festival in the southern German burgh of Balingen has attained cult status among hard-rock fans. The family vibe and smart mix of big-name headliners and local heroes is a magnet for the heavy-metal crowd. As a prelude to the three days of noggin’ knocking riffage at the outdoor show, metal-heads were able to get into the swing of things at the warm-up show in the neighboring exhibition hall. Big names like Lordi and assorted newcomers took the stage with the new COSMO system from HK Audio providing the audio support. It was the line array’s debut at the Bang Your Head festival.
COSMO mingles discreetly with the stage design, you can hardly trace it from afar.
A premiere for Prolite
“Having auditioned COSMO just a few weeks earlier at HK Audio in St. Wendel, we are now conducting our first field test with the system,” says Frank Pfister, Managing Director of Prolite Event GmbH. His company has been providing sound reinforcement for the warm-up show for several years now. “Right from the start, the system impressed us with its easy handling and flexibility with features such as Compressed Mode. And its output is just as impressive…”
The CS 118 subwoofer array.
With a little help from HK Audio Sales Consultant and pro audio/rental product specialist Arne Weitzel, Prolite rolled out a main system consisting of two sets of ten C 8 top units and sixteen CS 118 subwoofers in a direct-radiating configuration to cover the 50-meter exhibition hall on the Bang Your Head grounds. Four more horizontally arrayed C 8s served as near-fills to cover the audience area in front of the stage. The crew placed two CX 12 fullrange speakers from the new CONTOUR X line at the outer edges of the sub array for use as out-fills. CONTOUR X systems also provided optimum sound on stage, with CX 12 top / CT 118 subwoofer combinations serving as side-fills and CX 15s as stereo drum-fills.
C 8 as the main PA.
Stellar performance
The COSMO system defied the exhibition hall’s adverse acoustics to deliver a persuasive performance on the evening, serving up powerful, punchy hard rock and metal sound for the five bands and an audience of almost 2,000. “The biggest problem was certainly the raised glass front at the rear of the hall. We have had problems in the bass range time and again in the past. After painstakingly measuring and fine-tuning the delay times, we now have the hall very much under control,” says Frank Pfister.
Bang your head to the sound of COSMO.
Proven tech
The warm-up show has been a great curtain-raiser for the Bang Your Head Festival for years now. This latest installment carried on that tradition in style thanks to the new COSMO system. The hall’s small stage may be dwarfed by the giant outdoor main stage, but the sound was big as could be. With this positive experience to build on, Frank Pfister and Prolite are very much looking forward to deploying COSMO at other events: “We have long had various HK sound systems for rent, including the LINEAR series, and are very familiar with the underlying technologies. The new COSMO is the next logical step for us and it will certainly accompany us into the future.”
