Finsbury Park Weekend Festivals

Higher levels at FOH and lower off-site noise achieved for this year’s back-to-back weekend concerts in Finsbury Park with a d&b audiotechnik GSL system from Solotech

Finsbury Park once again played host to Wireless Festival, a headline gig from Sam Fender and Community festival over back-to-back weekends in July. The park lies in the middle of a heavily populated area in North London, which presented significant challenges with off-site noise limits.

Solotech UK partner SSE Audio opted to deploy a d&b audiotechnik GSL package for the events, with the system remaining largely unchanged over the five days of performances.

Main and side hangs comprised d&b audiotechnik GSL cabinets these were deployed left and right of the stage with d&b SL subs ground stacked in front of the stage apron, in a spaced array. A total of nine delay towers, in two rings, comprising a mix of d&b auditechnik KSL, V and Y  cabinets ensured even coverage to the rear of the arena.

Wireless Festival focuses on DJ and rap artists, while Community Festival is more centred on traditional rock and roll, so the system had to be capable of delivering a diverse range of music. Wireless will be more sub-heavy while artists such as Sam Fender require more musical fidelity. All this needed to be achieved while ensuring the strict off-site noise limits were adhered to.

Solotech Technical Manager Nick Lythgoe commented, “This year we set out to increase the amount of head room available to the FOH engineers without upsetting the local residents. Finsbury Park is a site that is well known to us, so it was several small incremental changes to our existing designs, such as trim angles and the overall height of arrays that enabled us able to achieve our aims. We’ve done a lot of work in identifying the key elements of a system that influence off site noise, and it was those areas that we were able to focus on.”

The results achieved spoke for themselves: FOH levels were up across the weekends, with Sam Fender’s Friday night performance achieving an average of 103.5 dB LAeq measured over a 15-minute period with no off-site limits being breached.

Jim Griffiths, Director of Audio Consultants Vanguardia who were responsible for the audio monitoring commented, “We like to be involved from the outset of a project, something that the team at Solotech are happy to do. They send over their initial designs which we run through our software and we make suggestions based on our findings.”

“The increased headroom at FOH made it much easier for the engineers to deliver a good show. This results in a happy audience which, in turn, leads to a happy promoter. The feedback we’ve had from Festival Republic has been extremely positive.”

“In summary the system achieved the highest SPL levels for this site, with no breaches of the off-site limits. The changes to the design this year speak for themselves and show the skill and dedication of all involved.”