Savanna Sound of Summer stuns with Chauvet Professional, Allen & Heath and Martin Audio

Hosted in the coastal city of Longbeach in Namibia over the December Holidays, the Sound of Summer was a massive success drawing sold-out crowds from all over Namibia to come celebrate summer with DJs Dean Fuel, Abby Nurock, Lazarusman and a host of local talent including Pierre Pienaar entertaining the audience. The Plug & Play team handled the stage set-up, including gear from Chauvet Professional, ChamSys, Allen & Heath and Martin Audio, which truly brought the event to life.

The entire lighting rig for the event was made up of Chauvet Professional fixtures, controlled through Chauvet Professional Net-XII Art-Net. Their team utilized two Colorado PXL Curve 12s, which are fully pixel-mappable motorized IP65-rated RGBW LED battens with individual control of zoom, tilt, and colour across the independent heads. They were complimented by two of the Chauvet Professional Vesuvio II. These touring-grade smoke machines illuminate bursts of fog with advanced RGBA+UV LED colour mixing, providing ferocious effects for events and performances.  Two Chauvet Professional Maverick MK Pyxis moving heads completed the look with their distinctive ring of nine 15W RGBW LEDs. With a zoom range of 4.9° to 58.4° and built-in colour macros and gobos, as well as a punchy 60 W RGBW LED serving as a centre pixel with a 3° beam angle the Pyxis packs a striking visual look.

ChamSys MQ70 was the choice for lighting control. The console features a 10.1” Multi-touch display, with an illuminated encoder and fader tracks. It supports 24 universes with an option to expand to 48 using Art-Net protocol, it also includes WIFI inbuilt into the console for quick connection to ChamSys MagicQ Remote focus application without the need for external networking hardware.

On the sound side, the Plug & Play team deployed 24 boxes of Martin Audio’s WPC line array. A 12-a-side hang partnered up with 12 Martin Audio SXH218 subs with 4 being in a cardioid setup. The WPC box is a 3-way bi-amped compact line array housing 2 x 10” drivers in a Hybrid configuration which marries the benefits of both horn and reflex loading.  Each driver is slot-loaded into a short horn to give a high sensitivity, while the rear of the driver is reflex-loaded to extend the LF output. Mid and HF horns are physically separate in the box — a key factor in the WPC’s exemplary 100° horizontal constant directivity dispersion pattern. With a peak SPL of 135dB the high-efficiency acoustic design can equal or outperform larger, direct radiator systems. This entire configuration was driven by 3 x Martin Audio Amp Racks housing nine iK42s for the main PA with an additional 2 to handle the monitoring.  Each iK42 4-channel amplifier can deliver up to 20,000 watts of power.

For DJ booth monitors, their team decided on four of Martin Audio Torus T1215. These 12” Passive, 15-degree Fixed Angle Constant Curvature Array Loudspeakers have a single 12” (300mm) LF driver with three 1.4” (35mm)/1” (25mm) exit HF drivers, delivering a maximum SPL of 128dB continuous, with a 134 dB peak. They were reinforced with two of the Martin Audio SX218 Subs, which are dual 18″ Passive Direct Radiating Subwoofers. These touring grade subs feature 4” (100mm) voice coils on the dual drivers. The waterproof cones offer a Maximum SPL of 144dB. This entire monitor configuration was run on two of Martin Audio iK42s power amplifiers.

For mixing, the Allen & Heath SQ7 was the ideal choice. The largest surface in the SQ range, the SQ7 features 32 (+1) faders with 6 layers, a high-res 7” touchscreen, 48 input channels, 16-line outputs, 16 assignable Softkeys, and 8 assignable rotaries. The SQ7 is powered by the Allen & Heath’s XCVI 96kHz FPGA engine which delivers an insanely low latency of 0.7ms. The SQ-7 was paired up with the Allen & Heath GX4816 expander which continues the 96kHz operation chain and is loaded with 48 dLive mic preamps each with independent Phantom Power LED indicators, plus 16 XLR line outputs. Additionally, 2 DX ports are provided for connection to up to 4 DX Expanders for further I/O expansion.

Special thanks to the Plug & Play Event Solutions team for keeping us up to date and raising the level of event production in the Namibian space with incredible experiences like the Sounds of Summer.