For the past 13 years, Incheon, South Korea has hosted the Pentaport Rock Festival, held in the city’s Pentaport Park for three days each summer. Produced by Yescom Entertainment, it is one of the country’s biggest live music events and covers a wide variety of musical genres.
In 2018, it featured the industrial rock of Nine Inch Nails, the moody electronica of Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda and the shifting nuances of My Bloody Valentine to name a few. But for all of the diverse styles, the L-Acoustics K1 and K2 system, supplied by local rental company Seoul Sound, delivered consistency of SPL and tonal balance across every inch of the main KB Kookmin Starshop Stage’s extensive field.
Yescom Entertainment’s An Heung Chan accepted the role of Production Manager for the festival. “We know how crazy it can be to cope with so many bands from so many different musical genres, all sharing the same stage over three days,” he said: “Dealing with the schedule and set changes took a lot of time, but the audio was ultimately the most important part of the production.”
An Heung Chan has had many good experiences with Seoul Sound and its L-Acoustics systems, so was confident that the company’s Kim Do Seok and his team of Engineers would be a great asset to the event. “Being a sound engineer and musician myself, I had great expectations of the sound system,” he added.
“We chose K1 and K2 because we knew it would consistently cover the entire main stage field, which is 100 meters wide by 160 meters deep,” explained Seoul Sound System Engineer, Seo Hyung Man: “As always, the design we did in L-Acoustics Soundvision program was really accurate and LA Network Manager software provided all the tools we needed through each step of the setup, tuning and monitoring in real time.”
The two main arrays for the KB Kookmin Starshop Stage each comprised 12 L-Acoustics K1 underhung with 4 L-Acoustics K2s. Additional fill for the side audience was from 4 arrays of Seoul Sounds’ L-Acoustics V-DOSC, whilst 12 L-Acoustics Karas were distributed in pairs across the stage lip to cover the front rows.
With the low-end frequencies catered for by L-Acoustics KS28 and L-Acoustics SB28 subwoofers—16 of each were evenly distributed across the front of the stage in cardioid mode—the system provided everything that Yescom was looking for.
“The choice of K1 and K2 arrays was excellent; they work seamlessly together to provide optimum SPL for the main stage,” concluded An Heung Chan: “The wide dispersion of the K2 provided good coverage for the front audience, along with superb sound quality. The ability to combine the K1 and K2 is just great. The system was gladly accepted by all, there were no surprises and it sounded absolutely perfect for every genre of music.”
