The Mars Volta is a high-energy, eight-member band whose stage performances have to be seen to be believed. Using effects pedals and stomp boxes to generate highly unusual sound textures, TMV has attracted a great deal of attention from fans and critics alike. When the band was planning its summer and fall tour, they opted to power their PA system with a dozen of Lab.gruppen’s new PLM 10000Q Powered Loudspeaker Management systems that incorporate the remarkable Dolby Lake processing for crossover, EQ and delay compensation. “The new PLMs sounds great,” enthuses the band’s front-of-house mixer Toby Francis. A seasoned veteran, Francis has worked with the likes of Velvet Revolver and Guns ‘n’ Roses.
“The Mars Volta is a loud band with a lot happening on stage. These Lab.gruppen (PLMs) let me hear things that I have never heard before with other rigs of this size. There is a level of clarity – particularly in the low-mids – that is outstanding, really smooth. The band uses lots of layered effects; now we can hear everything. These PLMs are definitely the next step forward!”
The 12 PLM 10000Qs are powering various combinations of the new Renkus-Heinz Versys VLX3 Line-Array cabinets. “We have used, or plan to use, as many as 10 cabinets per side in the larger auditoriums, such as the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York or the SDSU Open Air Theater in San Diego. For other venues we use a combination of flown and stage-mounted cabinets powered by the PLMs; it’s a very flexible arrangement that sounds great.” Los Angeles-based Rat Sound provided the remainder of the PA equipment for the tour, including RAT double-18 cabinets and L-Acoustics ARCS as side-fills.
“Flexibility is definitely the name of the game,” Francis considers. “At the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, for example, we thought that we might use the house PA, but decided at the last minute to cover the whole room using just the supplemental cabinets we’d rolled out onto the side of the stage. It worked out very well for us. However, when we left the venue the staff didn’t look too happy, because what we used sounded a whole lot better than the house system.”
“At Rat Sound we loaded the PLM’s Dolby Lake processors with parameters for the Renkus-Heinz cabinets that had been used for the Sturgis Rally a month earlier,” Francis explains. The annual Buffalo Chip Music Festival during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota marked the first use of the PLM 10000Q-powered Versys VLX3 cabinets. “It took just a couple of minutes with a wireless laptop to load the values, and it worked very well during the tour. We might have turned up the high-end EQ just a shade using the Lake circuits, but that was about it. We had separate set-ups that we could recall from the presets for a ground-stack configuration and for a flying array. And the PLM’s speaker control and monitoring is totally useful; knowing when a cable comes loose is great.”
“The Lab.gruppen PLM 10000Q is an effortless system to set up and use,” the FOH mixer concludes. “You buy it and forget it; in terms of powerful technology, we are finally at the right level.”