TAMPA, FL — In the afternoon hours prior to the Super Bowl, John Legend and Journey kicked off the day’s festivities with a concert staged just outside of Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium. For its sixth consecutive year, the NFL called upon Clearwing Productions to provide the sound reinforcement system for its official pre-game party, which this year made use of an L-Acoustics Kudo loudspeaker system.
Partially televised on NBC and attended by 10,000 guests, the invite-only Tailgate 2009 concert featured ground-stacked arrays of six Kudo enclosures per side paired with four SB28 subs, all positioned beneath large video screens adjacent to the stage. Four tiny MTD108 enclosures were spread out across the stage lip to provide front-fill coverage, with eight 115XT HiQ wedges available for monitoring. Loudspeakers were driven with LA Series amplification.
“The Kudo system sounded phenomenal at NFL’s official tailgate party,” said Scott Briese, Clearwing's audio shop manager. “The layout of the audience area required that we use a system with a wider dispersion pattern than V-DOSC but still have plenty of horsepower and throw, and Kudo did not disappoint. The client is fairly particular about where sound is and isn’t, so, thanks to the excellent pattern control of the enclosure, they were very happy with the sound.”
Clearwing also deployed a dozen ARCS enclosures as delays in the side tents flanking the audience area, as well as eight additional MTD108 and eight 115XT HiQ systems in the rear donut tent. Two additional stages — one in the lagoon area and one back on the donut stage — were also served by L-Acoustics rigs comprised of 18 dV-DOSC and 12 dV-SUB enclosures in total.
For more information, please visit www.clearwing.com and www.l-acoustics.com.
