Colombian Live Concert Scene Embraces Bose ShowMatch DeltaQ
Framingham, MA, June 25, 2018 – Thanks to the combined efforts of dealers, integrators, users and staff, the presence of Bose Professional in Colombia has recently increased. Sound Republik, a distributor of Bose ShowMatch systems based in Bogota, is one of the main supporters of Bose® products in the region, spreading its trust in Bose technology to the rest of the event production industry in South America. A great example is the recent acquisition of a large tour-packaged Bose ShowMatch™ DeltaQ™ array loudspeaker system. The groundbreaking line array system has already been used in a series of concerts and events and has surpassed the expectations of sound engineers, including leading rental company Iluminacion Jaime Dussan, in terms of capacity, coverage and power.
The popular music festival “Aguinaldo Boyacense,” which took place in late December 2017, was the perfect opportunity for Sound Republik to show the sound quality of a ShowMatch system composed of 54 modules and 32 subwoofers, complemented by seven Bose PowerMatch® and six Powersoft amplifiers, all controlled with a Dante™-based network.
“Bose Professional completely changed our job as professional audio dealers and revolutionized our work and technical knowledge as integrators,” remarks Orlando Gutierrez, General Manager of Sound Republik.
Upon the worldwide launch of ShowMatch, Orlando Gutierrez and the Sound Republik team took a big step and acquired their first ShowMatch system for demo purposes. The first opportunity to use it arose with the Aguinaldo Boyacense festival in the city of Tunja. The event is an annual one-week-long music festival that started in 1955 and is now a tradition during the Christmas holiday season in Colombia.
“One of the most important rental and production companies in the region, Iluminacion Jaime Dussan, met with us,” noted Gutierrez. They wanted to learn more about ShowMatch and asked to try it on a week-long festival. ‘If this system is not working for us, we’ll take it down ourselves,’ they warned us.” The challenge was significant, but Sound Republik relied on the ShowMatch system’s ability to fill wide areas and large venues with clear sound, as well as the team’s own experience and knowledge to take on this endeavor.
Using Bose Modeler® sound pattern analysis and setup software, the team was confident that the 140,000-square-foot area of Plaza Bolivar in Tunja could be completely covered by two main arrays with 18 ShowMatch modules per side, plus two six-module arrays for rear fill and individual SM20’s for front fill applications; in total, 54 ShowMatch modules and 32 SM118 subwoofers were used.
The week-long effort and work involved five to ten different music shows every day, all of them from a wide variety of music styles and genres: Colombian folk, salsa, vallenato, pop, rock and even metal. This, including the fact that several high-profile engineers, both local and foreign, would be using the system, became a comprehensive test of the capabilities and possibilities of the ShowMatch system.
At first glance, many artists, engineers and producers thought the system as installed would not be powerful enough to properly fulfill the festival’s high demands – mostly because, visually, ShowMatch is sleek and unobtrusive. Doubts were cast aside once the system started playing in the difficult setting of Plaza Bolivar, located 9,000 feet above sea level and featuring chilly, adverse weather, with performances scheduled from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. under far from ideal conditions.
“We hosted dozens of production staff, artists and engineers. All were extremely pleased by the response; the ShowMatch system had not only been approved but also gained a high-value reputation among the working professionals. Needless to say, the sound left the 25,000 attendees completely satisfied,” adds Gutierrez.
All of the engineers who got hands-on with the system left with very positive first impressions: “I liked the clarity on the voices. The high notes are well defined – I enjoyed that a lot, I mean, it really shows very rich clarity in the high end; I think that is the system’s greatest virtue,” said Marcelo Sanhueza, FOH engineer for the singer Nacho.
For Lucho Fernandez, sound engineer in charge of the band Alkilados, ShowMatch was a pleasant discovery. He remarks, “Since the moment we first played a song for the sound test we were surprised. At first, we were a bit reluctant, to be honest. Let’s just say we’re used to much bigger systems, physically speaking, but [ShowMatch] response at the show was amazing.”
John Buitrago, FOH engineer for Sebastian Yatra and J. Balvin, notes, “I think [this] is a very natural-sounding piece of equipment. Bose is not a brand you expect to see in such a highly demanding type of show, but I was pleasantly surprised by its headroom. We used it here for over 25,000 people; systems like this ought to be out there and available in the marketplace.”
Juan Camilo Fernandez, an engineer with prior experience mixing on the system, adds, “The main advantages the audience can expect from ShowMatch include clear sound, astounding sound pressure, power and cleanness, all in a really compact system. Also, the producer can hang or dismount the system more quickly, they can set many systems up in a small amount of time and can deliver great performance for huge audiences with fewer modules per system.”
Three days after the conclusion of Aguinaldo Boyacense, one of the producers at Iluminacion Jaime Dussan called to deploy the ShowMatch system, this time to be used in an open arena in front of 40,000 people at the Puerto Gaitan Summer Festival, which would take place next to the river Manacacias in January 2018. Legendary Colombian artist Juanes appeared as the main performer, with veteran concert mixer Stanley Soares in place at front-of-house. The system reportedly performed well in terms of power, fidelity, coverage and vocal clarity.
For more information, visit pro.bose.com.