The latest iteration of “Tunes in the Dunes,” an annual three-day festival on Perranporth Beach in Cornwall, UK that’s been running on the golden sands for 11 years after springing up from live music events at the beachside Watering Hole, was supported by Martin Audio partner Nub Sound (based in nearby Plymouth) with a main system headed by Wavefront Precision Compact (WPC) arrays joined by supporting components.
Specifically, the left and right arrays were comprised of eight elements a side, delivering coverage for headliners McFly (Friday), Craig David (Saturday) and Ocean Colour Scene (Sunday) along with supporting acts on the bill as their music drifted out towards the Atlantic Ocean.
On duty was Nub Sound director of operations and sound engineer Josh Small, who explains that in addition to the WPC elements, the system also incorporated a cardioid subwoofer array of eight SXH218 subs deployed in a castellated format to help insure rear rejection and stage spillage. Three WPS enclosures provided near fill coverage, with the main hangs driven in 2-box resolution from Martin Audio iKON multi-channel process-control amplifiers and the front fills individually amplified.
“We were in a very long arena, not particularly wide and needing to get consistent audience coverage from in front of the pit to right out to 55 to 60 meters behind the FOH position,” Small explains. “That’s something we can achieve really well with the Wavefront series.”
He also points to the environmental requirements of the event, which his sound team was able to meet via the control offered by proprietary DISPLAY software: “We were aware that we were in in a really residential area. Although Perranporth is only a small town, there are a number of high-quality hotels and residences on the cliff-top which we were pointing towards, and our neighbors naturally have concerns about being disturbed by events happening on this site.
“Therefore, we have to be really considerate about our offsite noise and we have to be really thoughtful about how we are going to impact the local populous.”
Small chose to employ the strict “Hard Avoid” setting in DISPLAY at the back of the arena, which he notes was ”really pushing the priority in the optimizations to get as much offsite noise control as possible. We specifically aimed the PA acoustically to avoid sending anything offsite.”
Finally, he also spoke of the logistics of getting the tech down to the beach from the cliff top: “It was a case of getting everything to the nearest hard standing car park, forking it off a lorry onto tractor trailers, bringing it to stage and then forking it off again.”
