Goodlife Festival Upscales Sound With Martin Audio WPL

Harewood House event boosts capacity to 10,000 and turns to a flagship Martin Audio WPL system from dBS Solutions, redesigned with DISPLAY software to ensure even site-wide coverage.

Building on last year’s sell-out debut, Goodlife Festival returned to Harewood House in 'Leeds on Saturday 6 June with a larger site and room for up to 10,000 attendees. With a main stage featuring Armand Van Helden, Groove Armada, Alison Limerick, Roger Sanchez and Inner City, event specialist dBS Solutions scaled up its deployment to a Martin Audio WPL line array to match the expanded audience area.

Originally specified with a WPC solution, surging sales triggered a rethink. dBS Solutions Director, Chris Bogg, explained: "We won the tender on WPC, but when ticket sales for Leeds started rising and the capacity increased, we re-examined the site. Martin Audio’s DISPLAY software was a fantastic tool because it allowed me to show the client, 'Look, you've opened up this audience area. If you want it to sound consistent, we're going to need a delay tower, and we might need to look at making the main hang WPL instead of WPC.' It was an incredibly helpful tool for guiding them through those choices."

With audience depth approaching 100 metres, the main PA comprised 10 Martin Audio WPL elements per side, coupled to a castle-wall cardioid sub array of 14 SXH218s. Coverage to the rear was reinforced by a single delay tower of six WPC elements with a cardioid stack of three SXH subs. Ground-stacked Martin Audio TORUS T1230 outfills handled the flanks, while FP12s on top of the sub array delivered front-fill.

"The scalability of the system is brilliant and it always sounds amazing," said Chris Bogg, dBS Solutions.

On stage, monitoring featured Martin Audio XE300 wedges, and the DJ setup used two SXC subs with an FP15 FlexPoint Series cabinet either side of the performer.

Noise control across the site was managed collaboratively with artists, engineers and the on-site noise team. As Bogg put it: "The noise management team would come back and forth to check on other tents, and if we were approaching the limit, we’d back it down a decibel or two. We would check in before the headliners went on to see what headroom we had left before hitting any off-site noise. While we didn't have a lot left to give in terms of off-site noise limits, there was tons of headroom in the PA itself. Giving them that extra decibel or two really livened it up and they were very pleased with the sound of the system."

This season also marks dBS Solutions’ 20th year in business. Reflecting on the milestone, Bogg said: “The people we get to work with make this a really nice way to make a living – the many incredible artists over the years, and the freelancers, contractors, and site teams we get to collaborate with. We are entirely about our team and working collaboratively with others.”

That ethos underpins the firm’s long-standing partnership with Martin Audio. "Our journey with Martin Audio has progressed from smaller boxes like WPM and WPS to WPC and WPL, allowing us to scale up to these large-scale festivals," Chris explained. "What really sealed it for us when we bought our first optimisable array was the scalable resolution. With Martin, you can step toward it. As a rental company, that means I can own a pool of amplifiers and deploy them at one-box resolution on a high-stakes gig where we need absolute off-site noise control, or run them at two-box resolution for a standard gig and use the remaining amplifier channels to run a second system on another site. The scalability of the system is brilliant and it always sounds amazing."

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Photos: nckpix / dBS Solutions / Good Life Festival