Lab.gruppen And Lake Take To The Water For Rock Legends Cruise

When faced with the prospect of putting on 58 rock performances over four days on board a cruise ship heading to The Bahamas, Bauder Audio Systems knew that they needed audio systems that were up to the job. With legendary bands such as ZZ Top, George Thorogood and the Destroyers and John Kay and Steppenwolf in attendance, it’s little wonder that they deployed Lake and Lab.gruppen in their audio inventory.

Bauder Audio, based out of Horsham, Pennsylvania, was hired by the organisers of the Rock Legends Cruise to provide the sound for all four stages being used on the ship, The Liberty of the Seas from Royal Caribbean.

Brian Naab, Production Manager at Bauder Audio, said: “It was a challenging job in a sense. We brought a PA into the main theatre, and we had a stage that was built out on the pool deck, and the PA had to cope with 20-40mph winds. The ship also has an ice rink that they convert into a 600 seat theatre, which has its normal challenges, like trying to hit every seat with a ground stack PA (because you can’t hang a PA on a cruise ship). All of the venues had their unique challenges.”

Naab’s team used a mix of Turbosound Aspect and JBL Vertec loudspeakers over the venues, and for both of these systems they utilised a combination of Lake LM 26s and older Dolby DLPs for digital audio processing, crossover and EQ.

Commenting on some of the reasons for choosing Lake for the gig, Naab said: “I think in a festival situation, the engineers like the ability to step out in front of the PA with the tablet computer, which you can do easily with the Lakes. (The Lake Controller software typically runs on a tablet PC.) Our engineers love the ability to walk around, walk up to the front fills, or check the back of the room out and make the adjustments. The speed alone of being able to do it by yourself with the tablet instead of calling out to some other tech behind the desk is a big time and energy saver. Apart from that, our engineers like the ability to copy and paste the EQ across, and they love Mesa EQ and the filters on them. In short, all of the Lake kits sound great!”

The monitor rig of the pool deck stage, a combination of Turbosound wedges and side fills, had to cope with unique challenges of the outdoor venue, so in order to power these, Bauder went for Lab.gruppen’s PLM 10000Q, one of the four-channel models in the acclaimed PLM Series of power amplifiers. Apart from the outstanding output potential of the PLM 10000Q, another reason Naab specified it for the Rock Legends Cruise was the amplifier’s Regulated Switch Mode Power Supply (R.SMPS), which gives the added benefit of stabilizing rail voltages to the output even with wide fluctuations of mains voltage. On board a cruise ship, where no direct mains connection can be found, this was a potentially important function for the amplifiers.

Of course, for a medium sized company, Bauder Audio has to make sure that any investment they make to increase their inventory will be worthwhile, and the purchase of more Lab.gruppen and Lake stock in late summer 2011 has certainly proven its worth in this respect, as Naab concluded. “We have gone to Lake and Lab.gruppen because both brands are widely accepted across the industry. Everyone loves using it, it sounds good, and it just works; that’s really it summed up,” he said.

“The use of Lake Processing has really become an industry standard, we see the request for Lake Processing in the tech riders every day now. It’s a very rider friendly FOH EQ system, and a lot of people just expect it to be there, they expect the wireless tablet to be there when they get there. So we’re fortunate enough, as a mid-sized company, to have been able to invest in a decent amount of product inventory from Lab.gruppen and Lake.”

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