Hungary - Pleasing 390,000 people is a difficult task. It is especially challenging when many of those people are musicians. At Budapest's 17th annual, five-day Sziget Festival, audio engineers not only kept 200 performances on 15 stages running smoothly but they kept headliners like Faith No More, Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, and Placebo more than happy.
"The Sziget system exceeded my expectations of what Meyer Sound speakers are capable of," said Ian Nelson, Placebo's sound engineer. "In fact, I found that I needed to do an almost unheard of act: turn the subs down. I've worked with most of the current speaker systems over the 2009 festival season. Mixing on Milo (line array loudspeakers) again cemented our decision to carry a Meyer system on our forthcoming autumn arena tour, again."
A critical component to making this high-stakes festival run smoothly is the self-powered sound systems from Meyer Sound. As Béla Dudás, the festival's technical director, explains, "Besides quality and reliability, the ease of installation and operation of Meyer Sound equipment are very important considerations when planning for a festival. Setup and teardown needs to be swift, and with Meyer's self-powered technology and QuickFly rigging, that is a given."
The large number of Meyer Sound loudspeakers needed for the festival exceeded the inventory of Budapest's Expander 2000, the festival's main sound provider. As in years past, Expander turned to UK-based Capital Sound, a long time partner and Meyer Sound dealer to supply Milo and Mica line array loudspeakers and 700-HP subwoofers.
"We enjoy working with the crew at Sziget. The system design, installation, and tuning they do is amazing," said Paul Timmins, project manager at Capital Sound. "The new generation of system people is well educated and ambitious. The level of the festival crew is top-tier."
