Blog

When we started to focus on the PSSO CLA at the end of 2007, we thought its primary application are sports halls and other public buildings or venues. Consequently, the first locations where the CLA was installed during and shortly after its development stage were sports halls in the vicinity of Würzburg. The CLA was intended to serve as fixed PA system at these locations and if necessary, could be complemented or replaced by a mobile PA system. Hence, our main focus was on vocal transmission and canned music. Initially, we did not urge the use in the rental sector for live shows.

After the system survived a cabaret artist who is known throughout Germany, and also the halfplayback of a successful carnival fool with a top 10 hit, as well as the promotion tour of a Norwegian band, our rather conservative approach changed step by step. By mid-2010, we became so convinced of the Line Array’s quality that we wanted to use it for live concerts, too. We searched for event organizers who were crazy enough to accept a Line Array that was completely unknown to them–and succeeded!

Our first victim was the US army base in Schweinfurt, Germany, where a huge party with live music is celebrated every year on the occasion of the American independence day. For this purpose, three stages are always set up next to each other, and bands of different music styles play on a rotating basis. The PA remains the same: One main system at the biggest stage in the center, and smaller wings at the two outer stages. However, the location’s spacious area and steep slope were challenging. We opted for 16 CLA-228 tops, four suspendable CLA-115 subs and eight CLA-118 floor subs for the main stage. With this setup, we were able to achieve a volume level decreasing gradually over the distance, along with only a minimum loss of sound quality. Mission accomplished: Organizers, bands and the crowd were pleased and the sound engineer did not want to give back our test system.

Two weeks later, a concert followed that was some kind of different. Three Protestant communities invited to a youth church service with rock band at the Fortress Marienberg in Würzburg, Germany. Again, the main issue of this location was its fairly steep slope. As the focus was on speech intelligibility, we took great care to select the right kind of equipment in the run-up. All in all, we decided to stack eight CLA-228 tops and four CLA-115 subs on the stage. By the way, the stage was huge: One week earlier, Mark Knopfler of the Dire Straits and two weeks later Xavier Naidoo used it for their concerts. As the stage was extraordinarily high, we could achieve a top speech intelligibility across the entire area without the need to suspend the system.

In September 2010, we used the same setup for the street music festival STRAMU in Würzburg, Germany. The festival does completely without any stages and is the biggest of its kind in Europe. As the event was free to the public with no admission charged, it was difficult to predict the size of the crowd for the main venue at the market square as it depended primarily on the weather. A further problem were the extremely different musicians who were to perform throughout the weekend: From individual musicians with guitar and vocals or artists with headset and music playback, up to full-size bands and a jazz orchestra, everything was represented. The system’s performance was so impressive that we are sure the PSSO Compact Line Array will also be most suitable for various other PA applications.

Meanwhile, the CLA has become a vital part of our assortment and a kind of figurehead of PSSO. The pleasing sales figures do confirm our product concept, of which the test concerts described have played an important role.

[tubepress video=”APQO-7uiMgA”]