Originally booked for March 2020, the Rick Astley "Best of Me" tour finally went out in October 2021. I was the Audio Crew Chief and System Engineer, working with Sam Parker (FOH), Samantha White (Monitors), Tim Miller (SL PA Tech), Jon Reynolds (SR PA Tech) and Kevan Snuggs/Ben Bannister (Monitor Tech). Here we all are with the backline Team, Tori Lucion (Drums/PB Tech) and Sara Ferrero (Guitar/Keys Tech).
We toured an L-Acoustics K1 rig, with K2 side hangs and flown KS28 subwoofers. It was supplied by BCS Audio (part of Solotech UK) out of their Redditch warehouse. Here's a picture of the full Rig in Newcastle.
The flown subwoofers really improved horizontal low end coverage compared to a ground sub array. There is of course the typical "power alley" effect, but this is inherent of any large K1 system as the main hangs go down to 35Hz even before you've added the subs. Even with a ground sub array, you struggle to get coverage wider than 90 degrees, which in some arenas is only 60% of your audience, and this comes at the expense of a very loud front row and vast changes on-axis to off-axis.
The biggest change is now that we've got subs in the air, the flown system acts as a single source, and the alignment doesn't change as you move up the room. On a flat floor this is less of an issue, but in tall arenas, having the subs separated by almost 20m means that you can very easily "suck" the low end out of the higher seats.
I flew 8 KS28s a side, and added 8 subs across the front of the stage to fill in the first few rows, but these were gained down quite a lot.
Another nice thing I had on this tour was a centre fill - a small hang (in this case KARA II with a pullback frame) flown above the front of the stage to fill the HF 'dead zone' in-between the two main hangs for the first 10m or so.
This really helps with intelligibility in these seats and makes sure that these people get the same show as we hear at FOH. The pullback frame makes the hang much easier to rig and position correctly. In general the angles stayed very similar for this hang, but changed slightly depending on the trim of the main hangs.
The whole system was driven by 2 of these amplifier "packs", each of which had 25 LA12X amplifiers, fed over AVB from a P1 at FOH, using Luminex switches. I had the rig configured so that I could swap 2 boxes of K2 between the main and side hangs depending on the venue shape/size.