Rolling Loud Festival 2016

The Rolling Loud Festival is a major Hip-Hop event. This year’s artist roster included some of the biggest names in Rap/Hip-Hop today, including Future, 2 chainz, Young Thug, Lil B, Curren$y, Kodak Black, and several additional artists. To ensure the music was reproduced accurately and with high enough sound pressure levels to ensure coverage throughout the audience area, loudspeaker systems from the catalog of Valencia, Spain-based DAS Audio were deployed.

LPS Production Services of Miami, FL, a full-service entertainment production company that handles lighting, sound, video, and staging, was contracted to handle the audio logistics for this year’s festival. Company president Jose Laria, who is actively involved in everything from sales to system design to on-site engineering, discussed the project and his reasons for deploying the DAS Audio loudspeaker systems.

“This was a big, outdoor concert event, so we needed to ensure that the system had excellent music reproduction to provide clear, even coverage across the entire area. To accomplish this, our setup included sixteen Aero-50 large-format line array elements—with eight enclosures each for the left and right main hangs. These were augmented by four Aero-12A powered line array modules—two enclosures per side that served as downfills. For low frequency support, we placed twelve DAS UX-221A powered subwoofer enclosures, which we arranged as a center cluster—stacked 2-high across the front of stage.”

“For sidefills, we deployed six Aero-20A powered line array elements—three enclosures each for left and right—and coupled these with four LX-218A subwoofers, which were positioned two enclosures per side. We also used another four DAS Aero-20A enclosures for frontfill. The stage monitor setup consisted of four Road-15A powered stage monitors while, for the DJ monitor setup, we used two Vantec-215A powered enclosures with two Vantec-18A powered subwoofers. These loudspeakers were arranged one stack per side.”

When asked for his reasons for selecting this DAS loudspeaker equipment, Laria offered the following, “With a lot of hip-hop shows, it’s difficult to get a consistent level of vocal intelligibility while maintaining the amount of bass the audience expects. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance both these loudspeakers delivered—all without any drawbacks. Further, the amount of air moved by the UX-221 is very impressive, and also  is very impressive in its ability to reproduce frequencies you can’t get with a double 18-inch subwoofer and they’re very fast and clean for such a large driver.”