One Direction entrusts the audio system of their 'Where we are' tour to the J Series of d&b

British-Irish group One Direction, One of the great musical revelations of recent years, with millions of fans around the world, has used a J-Series cluster-based audio system from d d&B Audiotechnik, supplied by Wigwam Acoustics.

No one doubts that One Direction (1D) It's the 'boy band, of the moment. Trained in 2010 in London, the quintet composed of Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson made themselves known during the broadcast of 'The X Factor' game show in the United Kingdom.

Since, His career has been meteoric and followed by millions of fans around the world, Filling stadiums on all their tours. In the last of them, called 'Where we are' and with which they have toured Europe and South America this summer, The group has had the technology of d&B Audiotechnik.

The person responsible for Wigwam Acoustics, company in charge of supplying the equipment for the One Direction tour, Chris Hill, explains that "we selected clusters from the J-Series of d&b audiotechnik for several reasons and, chiefly, because this kind of environment suits the J-Series perfectly. We knew that the J8 arrangements would deliver superlative performance on whatever challenge the show presented. Secondly, Its relatively light weight makes it the perfect choice, because restrictions in this regard played an important role in the final audio design".

As it is a large-scale stadium tour, one of the problems that the staff at Wigwam Acoustics had is that they were unable to install the equipment exactly as they wanted. Nick Mooney, Systems Technician This Company, recalls that "due to the complexity of the stage and the design of the show, we couldn't hang up the J-SUBs. We put all our attention into the placement of the SUBs to create a uniform and complete response in the different stages but, At the same time, it was necessary to avoid creating a huge subwoofer hot spot for the audience in the front rows. We achieve this thanks to the precise positioning of the J-SUBs and the creation of a subwoofer array by using the ArrayCalc software of d&b”.

Another challenge they had to face was "restricting the number of speakers in each of the main riggings to twenty," Mooney continues. Nevertheless, This decision did not compromise its function of uniformly covering the total surface of the stadiums. Everything went as we expected and the J-Series system performed exceptionally well in this type of environment. The concerts were packed and, Sometimes, the noise levels from the audience were quite shocking".

In this sense, Mooney points out that in the center of the stadium field the B-stage hydraulic stage traction device was placed about thirty meters from the main stage, "so the kids spent a good deal of time in front of the PA system, which is always a challenge for both monitor and FOH engineers.".

In addition to the main J-Series arrays, Wigwam Acoustics technicians used outfills that covered up to about 150° but, due to the large ticket sales for each concert, had to increase it to 200° or even, Sometimes, at 220°, for which they opted for additional V-Series riggings to provide the necessary precision and propagation.

In addition, there were two delay towers, located about seventy meters from the front edge of the stage on the stadium field, to provide maximum tracking gun travel. "The delays were used to improve the main system at the back of the field area and the lower seating levels," Mooney said, in addition to providing coverage to the upper levels. We used a mix of J8 and J12 along with some B2 subwoofers. The entire system was controlled via three XTAs 448 in FOH and the remote control software R1 of d&b audiotechnik".