SOUNDWAVE’S SOUND SYSTEM

Soundwave has become an iconic part of the summer circuit, bringing together local and crowd-drawing international acts, with this year’s festival seeing Green Day, A7X and Alice in Chains headlining. The festival can have up to 90 bands performing in a single day, so we wanted to know what kind of system the FOH uses for each of the stages and weren’t surprised to hear that Avid’s Profile was chosen to mix and provide recording for both headlining and line-up performances.

Main stage and stage 2, needed a reliable front of house (FOH) console that could cope with the size, scope and complexity of the headliners’ live sound requirements. Soundwave Audio Production Manager, Bruce Johnston used three Profile systems for FOH and three SC48s for monitors. These stages were duplicated for the forward setup while stages 3 through to stages 6A and 6B all employed Profiles for FOH.

“The majority of touring artists list the Profile as their preferred FOH console,” says Johnston. “We have noticed a trend towards more demand for Profile for monitors with at least 50% of acts now specifying [they want them when playing] other festivals across Australia.”

Both the Profile and SC48 systems run Venue software, giving artists access to workflows that can be integrated with Pro Tools and the opportunity to record their live performances.

Johnston went on to say, “Overall, there were more than seven stages equipped with Profiles and the total set-up consisted of twenty-six Profiles and five SC48 systems. Over the course of Soundwave we took up nearly all of the available systems for hire in Australia to cover the demand. We had a spare console but we never had to use it because the Profile and SC48 are incredibly stable and reliable.”

For information on Soundwave 2015 visit soundwavefestival.com.

The Soundwave 2014 Stage Line-up

Stage 3: 2 x Profile FOH, 1 x Profile monitors, 1 x SC48 monitors
Stage 4 and 4 annex: 1 x Profile FOH, 1 x SC48 FOH, 1 x Profile monitors
Stage 5A and 5B: 2 x Profile FOH
Stage 6A and 6B: 2 x Profile FOH
Stage 7A and 7B: 2 x SC48 FOH

Plus
4 x touring Profiles brought in by key artists
1 x Profile as backup.

Excerpts from Press Release