Maidstone, UK – July 2018
Triple A Events fielded Axiom line array PA systems for two music festivals in Kent over the last weekend in June. The Sittingbourne-based supplier of sound, lighting and staging ran the two events in parallel, splitting equipment and crew over the two sites in what is turning out to be the company’s busiest summer season yet.
“Most of our work comes from referral, and now that word’s got about that we’ve got bigger PA systems to hire our clients are happy for us to put Axiom on riders,” says Triple A’s Colin Umbers. “We are a multi-service company – with lighting and staging as well as sound – and that helps to open other doors, and we’ve found that clients prefer having a single supplier for everything and only one point of contact.”
Now in its fourth year, Ramblin’ Man is a relative newcomer on the festival scene, but with past appearances from Gregg Allman, Whitesnake, Warren Hayes, Black Stone Cherry, Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult, it has become the place to be for classic and contemporary rock, progressive rock, blues and country music. Triple A’s permanent crew of Umbers plus sound and lighting engineers Rob White and James Harris were on site at Maidstone’s expansive Mote Park to prep for the Stage 3 tent, where the Axiom PA consisted of three AX2010A dual 10-inch powered line arrays ground stacked per side on two SW218A double 18-inch powered subs, with a pair of AX2010A in the centre as front fills.
“It’s an easy system to set up, and we were well ahead of schedule for the noise monitoring tests,” he continues. “There’s a lot of residential property around the festival site which we needed to be aware of, but you can focus the boxes very accurately and once the perimeter limit was set we were able to run comfortably at about 110dB at front of house around 30 metres from the stage. System EQ was flat, we just used the box presets to set the top ones to long throw and that was it. PRONET AX is running on a laptop at FOH and it’s really easy to use – we find that you can throw any of the sound engineers in front of and they just get it straight away.”
Meanwhile 40 minutes down the road in a leafy Kent suburb, the second Axiom PA was going in at Chislehurst Rocks for a one-day family event, this time made up of two AX2010A boxes ground stacked on a single SW218A per side. “Performance on both systems has been great, we love it. They’re very efficient and power consumption is very low… ten years ago you’d be taking four or five big drive racks out to power this kind of system with more weight in the truck, more power pulled from the generators – this whole stage here at Chislehurst is running off a 20kVA generator.”
The outlook for the coming months, according to Umbers, is “looking very busy. We have another two big events coming up that will require the full system – again there’s a lot of chimney pots around so we’ve got to be careful on positioning and aiming. For jobs like these you want a PA that’s quick and easy, plug and play really – and that’s exactly what Axiom offers.”
