Them Crooked Vultures land on X-Line in Austin
Austin City Limits Music Festival, one of the premier music festivals in the U.S., recently capped-off another fantastic year of musical festivities. Held from October 3-5, 130 bands gathered in the Texan capital to treat music fans to three full days of performances across eight stages. Robert Ausmus of LD Systems (Houston, TX) and his crew relied on an Electro-Voice X-Line line array loudspeaker system to provide exceptional sound reinforcement for the Xbox 360 stage.
The Xbox 360 stage saw crowds of up to 35,000, and featured a diverse range of headliners, including Them Crooked Vultures – a supergroup featuring John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters) and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) – Girl Talk, STS9 and Raphael Saadiq among many others.
LD Systems deployed a main FOH rig comprising two arrays of eight full-range X-Line elements - Xvls & Xvlt - over eight Xsubs. Xn boxes were used for out-fills.
“This is our sixth year now serving the festival and every year we’ve used the X-Line system,” says Ausmus. “X-Line is a known quantity for us and has always produced excellent results. The challenge here is that up to five bands play each day for crowds as large as 35,000 people; we need a system that delivers consistently excellent audio for all the acts, a system that sounds good with minimal tweaking.” The PA was powered by EV TG and PL series remote control amps running IRIS-Net control and supervision software. Performance was further optimized with EV’s latest FIR-Drive FIR filter-based processing.
“While a stretch, bearing in mind that the crowd swelled to 35,000 and that we didn’t use any delays, this configuration covered the entire venue and provided all the punch and definition you’d want from a rock show, with all the dynamics you’d want from a DJ set,” Ausmus adds. “Them Crooked Vultures was amazing – like seeing Cream play again. This was the perfect system for them. X-Line just sounds good, and that’s why it’s our flagship system.” The festival’s producers, C3 Presents, representatives from Austin City Limits Music Festival and the bands themselves were all reported to be very pleased with the EV system’s performance.
LD Systems crew:
Kelly ‘Lil Rustler’ Jones (Chief), Chris Neimeyer, Gerry Diaz, Mark Thompson
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