QUEBEC CITY – Since its modest beginnings in 1968, the annual Quebec City Summer Festival (Festival d'ete de Quebec) has grown, and now draws more than 1.5 million people over its 11-day span each July. This year's production involved nearly 300 musical performances spread out across three outdoor stages and seven indoor halls.
The primary performance venue for the festival is the Bell Stage, which, from July 7 through 17, hosted Ben Harper, Elton John, John Fogerty, Simple Plan, Avenged Sevenfold and Metallica, among many others.
Following an initial audio design concept by 20k president Alexandre Forgues, Montreal-based Solotech served as the official production supplier for the Bell Stage again this year and deployed a full L-Acoustics loudspeaker system.
The main LR arrays were comprised of 14 K1 line source elements plus three KARA down-fills per side, each paired with an adjacent array of eight K1-SB subs. Eight V-DOSC plus three dV-DOSC covered the far left and right sides, and six additional dV-DOSC were spread across the stage lip for front-fill. Two dozen SB28 – all ground-stacked in cardioid configurations – provided low-frequency impact.
Out in the audience area, twin towers of nine KUDO plus a third hang of nine dV-DOSC functioned as the first delay ring, while four towers of eight V-DOSC plus four SB-218 subs comprised the second delay ring. This setup reached more than 115,000 fans during the most-packed performance.
Last year's Quebec City Summer Festival was one of Solotech's first opportunities to use its new K1 system and, according to senior project manager David Brazeau, the team has been highly pleased with its results so far.
"For this year's festival, we improved the consistency of our low-end coverage and created an even more impressive impact," Brazeau said. "Even at 800 feet out from the stage, the audience had the level of impact that made them feel that they were 'in' the show rather than simply 'at' the show."
Calling K1 "globally accepted," Brazeau added that "we have never had an engineer not be excited to mix on it, and the comments from both concertgoers and artists on the sound at the festival this year were extremely enthusiastic."
For more information, please visit www.l-acoustics.com and www.solotech.com.
