Lab.gruppen powers Roskilde festival to new heights with PLM

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Westlake Village, CA (July 2008) Over 67,000 visitors flocked to the Roskilde Festival just outside Copenhagen in Denmark for a week of sunshine, partying and music.

One of the biggest music festivals in Europe, Roskilde also has the reputation of being one of the most diverse, welcoming living legends alongside brand new talent and up-and-coming bands. Leading Danish PA company, DPA Soundco, has provided sound reinforcement for many of the stages at Roskilde for several years, and 2008 was no exception. However, this year saw a brand new system on the Orange stage, (the main stage at Roskilde) powered by Lab.gruppen’s new flagship Powered Loudspeaker Management system, the PLM 10000Q.

The new system, described as “a real step up” from last year, featured JBL Vertec cabinets handling the mid-high frequencies powered exclusively by a total of 34 Lab.gruppen PLM 10000Q devices, running two Vertec loudspeakers each. All of the PLMs were run on AES for the main signal and on analogue for redundancy. The bass frequencies were handled by 24 Nexo CD 18s per side powered by 24 Lab.gruppen fP6400 power amplifiers while the Martin Audio delay system was powered by Lab.gruppen FP+ Series FP 10000Qs and FP 13000s.

DPA Soundco’s technical guru, Gorm Jakobsen, is already a fan of the new units. “We’ve always had Lab.gruppen amplifiers in the warehouse at DPA, but the new PLMs definitely take amplifier and processor technology to a new level,” he noted. “We tested them extensively on other festivals before putting them on Roskilde, and the results were astonishing. We asked everyone who used them to drive them as hard as possible, and we adjusted the settings accordingly, trimming them back each time so that by the time we arrived at Roskilde we had the perfect settings. Our Vertec system has never sounded so good, and yet the PLMs were only running at 50% of their maximum temperature, even for bands like Slayer who test any system to its limits.”

“Technically speaking, the PLMs are a dream to work with out in the field,” he continued, citing their performance monitoring and load verification capabilities as being particularly noteworthy. “You know exactly how each unit is performing at any given time,” he said. “I particularly like the limiter settings found in the ISVPL (Inter-Sample Voltage Peak Limiter) which allows you to tailor each power output to the load connected to it, and then control it. What’s more, it automatically detects any voltage peaks in the signal and reduces the gain accordingly – very clever!”

“I also like the fact that the PLM can be any type of amplifier you want it to be, and in fact, several amplifiers at once. You simply configure each channel to handle whatever load is dictated by the loudspeaker and away you go,” stated Jakobsen. “Another big plus is the load verification test. Once your system is set up and tuned, you can run this quick test which will tell you instantly if the reality of your system corresponds with what you’ve told the PLM. For instance, any wiring problems, like unconnected or mis-connected speaker cables will show up instantly because the PLM will register “no load” instead of what you’ve told it to expect. This is a really useful tool that helps both system performance and maintenance.”

Jakobsen added a final word on sound quality: “The PLM’s performance as an amplifier is irreproachable, but there is no doubt that the marriage between Dolby Lake and Lab.gruppen has produced a sound quality that really is a cut above everything else. We mustn’t forget that PLM isn’t just an amplifier, it’s a networkable loudspeaker processor. The Dolby Lake crossover that is part of the processing package is an extremely high quality crossover, and the difference it makes to the system is audible. It sounds noticeably better than other industry standard outboard crossovers that we have used in the past.”