Show of strength

Published Thursday 20 March 2008 at 17:50

ADLIB Audio & Lighting recently supplied equipment for the Versus Cancer show held at the Manchester Evening News Arena, the line-up including the Enemy, the Fratellis Happy Mondays, Fun Loving Criminals, Athlete, the View and the Inspiral Carpets.

ADLIB’s new V-DOSC system was used for the PA, with front hangs of 12 V-DOSC per side, complete with four dV-DOSCs per side for downfills and side hangs of 12 dV-DOSCs elements. For front fills, they used eight ARCs cabinets, the subs being 16 of the high-powered L-Acoustics SB28s and eight SB218s - all ground stacked. The front hangs and subs were driven by the new LA8 amps, with the side hangs and fills powered by the Lab Gruppen standard, complete with ADLIB’s speaker cabling and infrastructure to make it work.

Both FOH desks were ‘babysat’ by Dave Kay and the system was looked after by ADLIB’s Tony Szabo. Most of the bands also brought their own engineers and any that didn’t were mixed by Kay.

The system was driven by five Dolby Lake Processors, one of which was set up as a matrix input switcher for the consoles, to keep the signal digital all the way from the console to the outputs. Szabo also utilised a Meyer SIM3 to align the system and aide with the system tuning. In monitor world, ADLIB’s Marc Peers approached the gig as a festival situation and supplied a total of 18 ADLIB MP3 wedges, flown Nexo Alpha sidefills, all run from Crown amplifiers and two Yamaha PM5D consoles - also run in ‘flip-flop’ mode with no outboard equipment.

The PM5D monitor consoles were manned by Ben Booker and Richy Nicholson.The smooth running of the show was greatly aided, states ADLIB, by the “unsung heroes at the sharp end”, according to Peers, referring to the mics and stage cables team of Walter Jaquiss, Declan Fyans and Laura Davis. Andy Liddle came onboard again as LD, working with Dave Reason, who was looking after the lighting for the DVD record by UK One Productions Ltd. ADLIB’s lighting crew consisted of crew chief Tim Spillman, Charlie Rushton, Neil Holloway and Richard Babbington.