Glastonbury

Akin to the annual Wimbledon weather forecast, Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Arts is normally associated with rain, mud, rain and a little more mud! This year however was nothing but blue skies, bright sunshine and acres of live music. My trip to Glastonbury is becoming an annual pilgrimage and each time I say 'never again' but there is something very addictive about this amazing event situated in the middle of the beautiful West Country. 180,000 members of the public, in addition to the thousands that work and perform there, all fenced in together with a similar desire for fun and entertainment for the week. The vibe is difficult to describe as the site is so vast that there are sub-cultures within the event.

The various music stages, that include the 'Pyramid Stage', the 'Other Stage' and the 'Acoustic Stage', hold the main headline acts but there are many more smaller stages and music areas around the site which hold more specific music genres such as the Dance Area, Jazz World (West Holts), Bourbon Street Bar and the Glade Area.

It was in this Glade Area I found one of our customers showing off the technical refinements of their speakers. Funktion-One took its own sound system which was set up as an Experimental Sound Field. This included loudspeakers in 6 positions in a hexagonal arrangement, on a 25m circle.  Each position consisted of 1x F121 21" bass enclosure and one Resolution 3 full range enclosure, as a 6 channel Ambisonics setup. I like to call this the 'Speaker Circle'. Unlike the pagan appreciation for stone circles this technological version is a spiritual home for audio fanatics as they are completely surrounded by high quality sound. The advantages to using  Funktion-One systems are that they have high directivity and therefore sound is able to be focused where it is needed, minimising sound leakage.  Another advantage is that all Funktion-One loudspeakers have a dedicated paper cone speaker for the mid range, unlike most other systems which try to cover the entire mid and high frequency range using a small metallic dome. Funktion-One's technical team have created these amazing speakers and it's perfect in this festival environment to avoid the clash of overlapping music. Diametric provided the high quality stainless steel badge for some of their speakers and hard wearing overlays with technical detail for the rear of their products. These have been specifically colour matched to correspond with their corporate colours and it was nice to see these products in the field ... especially a nice dry one! 

Click on the link to find out more about stainless steel badges and hard wearing overlays.