BOONVILLE, CA — Sacramento Production Services (SMS), which has been supporting the three-day Sierra Nevada World Music Festival here for 16 years, was the first to use Lab.gruppen’s PLM 20000Q amplifiers. SMS’ Keith Wackford and Dwaine Wise noted that, along with great sound, the amps helped sharply reduce the number of racks that SMS needed to use to support the event.
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For nearly two decades, the organizers of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival have been attracting world music fans to Boonville, California for an event that emphasizes community, social and environmental responsibility and the unifying power of music. While they’ve always held the conviction that music has the power to move mountains, this year, with their main FOH powered exclusively by Lab.gruppen PLM 20000Q amplifiers, they came a fair bit closer to being able to do so literally.
Although Sacramento Production Services has been providing audio for the three-day festival for 16 years, 2011’s SNWMF was the first time they’ve used Lab.gruppen amplifiers. “It’s our first year using the Labs and the first time we used Lake Processing on this PA. We built it and sent it out specifically for this gig,” says Sacramento Production Services’ FOH engineer and system tech, Dwaine Wise.
For several years the system has been relatively consistent, says SMS’ sales and production manager, Keith Wackford. This year it was comprised of 24 Martin W8LCs, 14 Martin W8LC double 18 subs and 2 Martin W8Cs as front fills. “All that off of just nine PLMs,” Wackford adds. “And everybody raved about how much more musical the PA was – plus our client said this was the best this PA ever sounded.”
In past years it took double the rack space to do the show, Wise says. “Cutting down on our racks was a big thing. We used to have to roll out four of them to do twelve a side. This time, when we were packing the truck we were like, are we forgetting something?” Lake processing also helped immensely, he adds. “Being able to monitor the amps from FOH and actually knowing exactly what’s going on – not just that an amp is clipping, for example, but why it is, and monitoring the temperature of the amps – on a summer festival gig that’s huge.”
In the end, the Lab’s helped Wise save time in tweaking the system and streamlined his workflow substantially, but they also provided far more sheer power than the amplifiers they’d previously used. “There’s a lot of reggae on the bill, and the more volume you can get, the happier people are. Before having the PLM 20000Qs, we just didn’t have that amount of power, and to get it we’d really have had to ramp up the number of amp racks we brought out,” he adds.
“We had a band come in first thing Sunday morning and their engineer asked ‘How loud can I make it? I said ‘you know what? I don’t know. Let’s see what you can do with it.’ He started mixing at 120 dB A-weighted at 10 O’clock in the morning and the system just kept cruising, no problem.”
