Meyer Sound M’elodie Helps Contour Provide Linear Sound for Germany’s Moers Jazz Festival
The International Whitsun Festival of Improvised Music (or Moers Festival for short) is an annual four-day jazz music event in Moers, Germany. For the third year, Overath-based contour licht & audio Veranstaltungsservice GmbH was chosen to provide sound reinforcement for the more than 20 acts performing in Moers’s venues, including the largest Festival Tent, which featured a Meyer Sound M’elodie line array loudspeaker system.
The Moers Festival presented an impressive lineup of international avant-garde artists including SpokFrevo Orquestra from Brazil, Extra Life and Wayne Horvitz from the US, Eivind Aarset Sonic Codex Orchestra from Norway, and more. “The wide range of music and international acts required a very linear and clean system,” explains Frank Kasper, co-founder and managing director of contour. “And to achieve a balanced sound at every seat in the tent, we needed a natural-sounding system that could accurately reproduce the dynamics of each performance. For the second year, we reached this goal with the Meyer Sound M’elodie.”
The Festival Tent had a capacity of 2,500 people seated on a tribune and on additional seats in front of an 18-meter-wide and eight-meter-deep stage. Kasper used two main hangs of nine M’elodie line array loudspeakers each, one UPQ-1P loudspeaker as centerfill, two additional UPA-1P loudspeakers as outfill, another six M’elodie loudspeakers in two delay hangs at the furthest poles, and six UPM-2P loudspeakers as nearfill. Eight 600-HP subwoofers, arranged in an end-fired, V-shaped array, provided bass support for the audience area, keeping low-end energy off the stage. The system was driven by a Galileo loudspeaker management system with two Galileo 616 processors. Final tuning was accomplished with a SIM 3 audio analyzer by Frank Kasper. System Tech during the festival was Björn Wiesehöfer.
Gerhard Veeck, Cologne Stadtgarten’s as well as the Moers Jazz Festival’s Technical Director is very satisfied with the continuously improving setup “Last year, contour used this end-fired bass array for the first time and we were instantly convinced. Since then we have – for the audience as well as on stage - the best sound in the 38 years history of the festival.” According to Veeck, artists’ as well as audience’s feedback is very positive and he continues, “we received also a lot of feedback in internet-forums and blogs which has been very positive, too. This is also the merit of the well-trained and very skilled contour team.”
This year’s Moers Festival was Reiner Michalke’s fourth year serving as artistic director. A former bass player and an active advocate for jazz music, Michalke is also the program director for the Cologne Stadtgarten jazz club.
Text: Meyer Sound
Photographs: contour, Frank Kasper
Source: www.meyersound.de
Click here to find more information about Moers Festival.