ROSKILDE
ROSKILDE Meyer Sound returns to Denmark as the exclusive sound provider for the Roskilde Festival, Northern Europe’s largest and longest-running music festival.
The event marked the second year of a groundbreaking five-year partnership that aims to leverage the strengths of the iconic music festival and the supplier of professional audio systems to elevate the festival experience for artists, fans, and technology providers. Now in its 49th year, the Roskilde Festival is massive in scale: This year’s events took place over eight days from 29 June to 6 July and showcased nearly 180 acts across eight stages – from big-name headliners Cardi B, Bob Dylan, Travis Scott, Janelle Monáe, Robert Plant, and Wu-Tang Clan, to Scandinavian superstars Robyn and MØ, to emerging regional artists, performing to daily crowds topping 130,000. But Roskilde is about much more than music, camping, and fun. The festival, which operates as a non-profit foundation, is a celebration of community and solidarity – ideals fostered year round through the generous support of humanitarian and cultural organisations in Denmark and beyond. Since its inception, the Roskilde Festival Charity Society has generated more than $58 million for charities around the globe. It’s these values that make the Roskilde Festival an ideal partner in the pursuit of providing a better festival experience, said Meyer Sound Executive Vice President Helen Meyer. “This is a festival with a heart,” she began. “They really care about what it feels like for everyone and they’re willing to do things differently to anyone else, and for us, that’s very, very exciting.” The partnership is a year-round collaboration focusing on education initiatives, R&D, and large-scale festival management. For partners steeped
in common traditions of creativity and innovation, this multifaceted approach provides an unprecedented opportunity to innovate and inform, with the event serving as both a technology showcase and a living laboratory where research efforts focus on sound propagation and management techniques. With a total area stretching more than 2.5 million square metres – the equivalent of 350 football pitches – there’s a lot of ground to cover at Roskilde, and a lot of potential cross-talk between stages that needs to be controlled. Nearly 1,000 Meyer Sound loudspeakers, supplied by European AVL integrator Bright Group, were deployed across all festival stages and performance spaces, from the 1,000-capacity Gloria stage to the iconic Orange main stage, with its staggering 60,000 capacity. LEO Family systems provided seamless solutions for the event, thanks to their clarity, linearity, reliability, and ease of use. “The LEO Family was developed to create an idea that linear theory applied to systems like these would mean that you could do a variety of stages with different kinds and sizes of equipment and keep the same sound,” said Meyer Sound President and CEO John Meyer. “This allows people to understand you don’t have to run it so loud all the time. What we’re trying to show here is that the sound system should be transparent.” The Roskilde stages were powered by the entire LEO Family, including LINA, LEOPARD, LEO and LYON arrays and 750-LFC, 900-LFC, and 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements, with VLFC very-low-frequency control elements adding bone-shaking low-end impact. Numerous point source loudspeakers including UPA-1P and the brand-new ULTRA-X40 – which was also used as main field monitors at FOH – provided delay and front fill support, while MJF-210s served as stage 80
