Taiwan - The largest mega-star performer in Asia, Rain has closed his latest world tour with the biggest live concert ever staged in Taiwan, hosted by the country's newest venue, the Kaohsiung World Games Stadium. Taiwanese rental company Bornfree joined with Korean colleagues from Seoul Sound in a collaboration to supply a Nexo Geo T/Geo D line array system for a record-breaking 40,000-strong crowd.
The closing show of the Legend of Rainism Tour represented a triumph for the city of Kaohsiung, stealing this prestigious show away from the more usual staging post of Taipei, which has much smaller venues although it is renowned for its dynamic music scene.
In order to secure the show with the producers of Korean star Rain, the Taiwanese promoter Brokers Brothers had to guarantee that the high-performance sound specifications, sophisticated lighting and video and large staging requirements of the production could be met by local partners. All the more important was the selection of suppliers who could deliver on a scale never attempted before in Taiwan.
Seoul Sound from Korea is the official sound production company for the Rain shows; Bornfree is a long-established Taiwanese rental and sound production company, as well as Nexo's rental partner and distributor in Taiwan. Although Seoul Sound is a long-time user of another high end sound reinforcement brand, Mr Cho (a.k.a Boss), the owner of Seoul Sound, announced that he was happy to work with Bornfree and with Nexo.
Nexo's Asia sales manager Nicolas Kirsch and Bornfree proposed a Geo T system for Taiwan's first stadium concert with Nexo. Using 32 cabinets per side, with 12 flown Geo Subs handling bass reinforcement 85-250Hz, and 24CD18s for sub bass below 85Hz.
The engineers first tried to position the subs stacked at stage level to get more projection, but the huge power caused the whole stage to vibrate, raising serious concerns about the integrity of the large LED walls located just above. Moving them back to the floor, the CD18s performed well, easily covering the whole 100m field with punchy sub-lows.
The rest of the system included 12 Geo D for side-hangs, shooting at 60 degrees off axis, and four Alpha E-F with two Alpha S2 for the stage front-fills. All systems were processed by Nexo NX242-ES4 with EtherSound facility, and powered by Camco V6 amplifiers. For the delay systems, clusters of three Alpha M3, three Alpha B1 and three Alpha S2 were used for the main delay tower covering the stands corners, with a central cluster of three Alpha e-F for the centre-fill delay tower.
According to Nicolas Kirsch, "The sound quality was very good all the way to the stage sightline limits, and even slightly further. There was no area of seating which didn't have a decent full-range and clear sound. Every seat could be sold."
