Seoul, South Korea (September 2014) — Adamson partner Alpha Sound was recently tapped to provide a substantial Adamson Energia sound reinforcement system for the AIA Real Life: NOW Festival held in Seoul, South Korea.

The two day festival took place at the Jamsil Olympic Stadium and featured pop icon and trend-setter Lady Gaga as the headliner the second night of the show. Other acts that performed during the festival included Psy, Miss Nine, Sidney Samson, Ivan Gough, Cazzette, twenty one pilots, Man With A Mission, Galaxy Express and Glen Check.

Both Sun Kim, technical support manager for Sound Solutions, Adamson’s South Korean distributor and David Dohrmann, technical director Asia-Pacific (Adamson), were on site to assist with system design, set-up and tuning of the Adamson PA.

For the AIA Real Life: NOW Festival, the Stadium was played sideways, ie. the stage was placed at the wide end of the stadium. Seating was on the field and also available in lower stadium tiers – seats that were located behind the stage were not used for the event.

Dohrmann worked closely with Sound Solutions to design a system utilizing Adamson’s Blueprint AV 3D modeling software.

“The stadium layout required a throw of 120 meters distance and 7m elevation to cover all of the seating areas,” explains Kim. “The goal was to achieve roughly 105dBA average SPL with a dynamic live music program throughout the listening spectrum without any gain reduction from the system limiters.”

In order to accomplish this, left-right arrays — each made up of 18 E15 and 6 E12 enclosures – were hung from scaffolding columns constructed on each side of the stage.

“I was pleased with how much headroom I had with the Adamson rig,” adds Chris Rabold, FOH Engineer for Lady Gaga, the Saturday night headliner for the festival. “I can’t stand the feeling of having a system that pushes back against what I’m trying to do – even the best ones do it from time to time. “

Low end was covered with two hanging columns of 12 Adamson E218 subwoofers flanking the E15/E12 arrays. In addition, 10 Adamson T21 subs were ground stacked beneath each E15 array with eight E219 subs deployed to deliver the pounding beat the music demands.

“The low end out of the air would have been sufficient to do most shows,” Rabold explains. “The addition of the T-21s and E219s on the ground was incredible. The low end capabilities from the flown rig and flown subs were about as big as I’ve heard.”

To complete the system, two additional line arrays – this time comprised of 16 Adamson Y18 enclosures – were added to handle out fill duties.

The entire system was driven by racks of Lab.gruppen PLM amplifiers with Lake Processing. The main line arrays were powered by 16 PLM 20000Q amplifiers, another 12 PLM 20000Q drove both the flown E218s (6 per amp), the ground E219s (4 per amp) and some of the T21 subwoofers (2 per amp).

“When we were tuning in the morning I quickly learned that there was a ton of power behind the rig,” concludes Rabold. “During the show it was absolutely fantastic – I was very impressed.”