70's Showco/Clair Festival PA

TONY.A.S.S. wrote: oldskool wrote: Robbo wrote: System would not even come anywhere near the Iron Maiden Monsters of Rock Festival at Donnington with 360 blue boxes(mainly TMS3s)which was giving a peak of 124db at FOH mix position 100yds from stage---entire system was 525kw of power and you could feel the kick drum hit your chest up to a mile away from stage. I am glad that I was there to witness it as it will never happen again in UK. Bloody hell John, I didn't know there were that many TMS3s ever, never mind in one place. Ooh that must have been an awful lot of fun to play with. Pity the poor sods who had to lug them all around though. Lee, we built well over 1000 TMS3's in our time. Turbosound were massive and did more than people could imagine. We usually did them 30 at a time per month along with all the other TMS models, so TMS3's would be at least 600 per year.

Blimey Tony, I didn't realise how big they were either to be honest. So, apart from the Iron Maiden stash of TMS3s that was posted here a while back, and I know Jacethebass  likes his Turbo too, is there anybody restoring/operating large classic turbo rigs still? I have heard a few smaller ten/twenty box TMS rigs over the last couple of years (not TMS3s though) but they sounded so bloody awful they must have been buggered somehow, or the operators were clueless.     

The biggest F2 system I can remember in the UK was for a show on Glasgow Green in 1990 for around 200,000 people. The site was about 200m wide and 400m deep. There were two main stacks and three delays. The two outer field delays used a mixture of F2 and old Martin Modular as there wasn't quite enough F2 in the country to do everything. The F2 came from Capital and Encore in London and For Music in Vienna, and the Martin Modular from Concert Sound in Luton.

The total speaker count was:
40 x BSX Subs
134 x F2B Bass
49 x F2-3M Mid boxes
21 x F2-3H2T HF boxes
38 x F2-2H3V HF boxes
22 x F2-MHT Combination boxes
24 x MH212 Philishave mids
16 x Concert Sound 2" JBL horns
12 x Concert Sound 1" JBL horns
8 x Concert Sound 3T  JBL tweeter boxes (3x 2402)

So the driver count was:
80 x 18"
268 x 15"
217 x 12"
177 x 2"
126 x 1"
72 x 2402 bullets

 = 1084 drive units in total

Bear in mind that the F2 concentrated a lot of speakers into a small space and maximised coupling between the drivers, so it was very efficient for its size and speaker content. In fact, the first few F2 Festival and Stadium tour systems were bigger than they needed to be, simply because the clients (FOH engineers) didn't believe a smaller (physical) size rig could do the job.


Here's another system list from 1989, Wembley Stadium. Being an early F2 festival deployment, this is an example of a rig that would have worked just as well with less boxes, (and the extra JBL long-throws, which were insisted on by the FOH engineer):

Main stacks and understage fills:
40 x BSX Sub
129 x F2B
46 x F2-3M
8 x F2-2H2T
10 x F2-2H3V
18 x F2-4H (4x 2" horns)
8 x F2-6V (6x 1" horns)
10 x F2-4V (4x 1" horns)
21 x F2-MHT
8 x JBL 2356 40 degree horns with 2440's
(above split into SL & SR stacks plus frontfills)

Plus delays (split into 1 mix tower and 2 outer field stacks) :
12 x F2B
8 x F2-3M
8 x F2-2H3V

4 x F1M
6 x F1H
These "F1" boxes were the original F1 system, a big heavy flyable rig of which only one prototype was built. The Mid was 2x12" like a bigger version of a Philishave, and the High contained a splayed pair of narrow dispersion horns with 2445 drivers.

Must get the pictures scanned sometime...




Edited by madboffin - 04 March 2014 at 9:16pm

Yeah,two stacks 67 cabinets high. Stick that in yer line array!

No dsp steering of the sound then, whack the two blocks a bit and bingo.

would love to see a snap or two of that :-)

Talking of Cars though, (bit of a diversion here) My good friend the Bass Player, had some yanks, and one of them was a '56 Cadillac Eldorado. I was absolutely amazed to see so many gadgets. It had power everything, but operated with levers. It was only then I realised how behind we were at one stage with driving aids. Unfortunately, after the '50's and '60's they let themselves down badly.

Edited by TONY.A.S.S. - 07 March 2014 at 10:04am