JBL Professional and AED Rent Host VTX System Listening Experience in Belgium

posted:

24/03/2012

More than 240 professionals from 45 companies attended the VTX Listening Experience

On Friday, March 16, AV rental system provider AED Rent and HARMAN’s JBL Professional hosted the VTX System Listening Experience at the AED Demohall at AED Rent’s global headquarters in Willebroek, Belgium. The event included a demonstration of JBL Professional’s next-generation V25 line array loudspeaker in a left-right format, powered by Crown VRack amplification with V5 processing, and mixed on a Soundcraft Vi6 console.

The VTX System Listening Experience began with a technical overview of VTX led by Paul Bauman, Senior Manager, Tour Sound, JBL Professional followed by an overview of Crown VRack and JBL HiQnet Performance Manager™, presented by Brian Pickowitz, Market Manager, Tour Sound, Crown Audio.

More than 240 professionals from 45 companies attended the VTX Listening Experience, including “Big” Mick Hughes, FOH engineer for Metallica. The afternoon listening sessions featured comparative listening tests between 12 deep hangs of VTX V25, VERTEC® VT4889 and L-Acoustics K1. All arrays were focused for 100-meter throw distance with identical angles and were carefully equalized and level-matched in order to provide a fair comparison.

Following comparative listening tests, Gert Sanner, HARMAN Professional EMEA Tour Sound Manager, demonstrated full left-right VTX system performance including subwoofers using show multi-tracks from Deep Purple to better represent the dynamics of real-world program material. Guest CD tracks were also used in the listening tests and attendees had an opportunity to gauge system performance using their own reference material.

“The VTX System Listening Experience was an intense, educational and overwhelmingly positive day, with a huge turnout and excellent results,” Bauman commented. “The event enabled us to showcase the distinct advantages of the VTX Line Array Series to a large number of professionals in the region and it was an excellent opportunity to see how the system performed in an outdoor open air situation as a follow-on to arena format testing at the LA Forum VTX Listening Experience.”

Pictured left to right: Brian Pickowitz, Market Manager, Tour Sound, Crown; Gert Sanner, Tour Sound Market Manager, EMEA, HARMAN; “Big” Mick Hughes, FOH Engineer for Metallica; Paul Bauman, Senior Manager, Tour Sound, JBL Professional; and Glenn Roggeman, CEO, AED group.

In January, AED Rent signed on as the first adopter of JBL’s VTX V25 line array loudspeaker and as a Strategic Partner in the VTX Network. AED Rent is known throughout Europe as a market leader and a total solution provider to AV rental companies exclusively, making the company an ideal candidate to help introduce the revolutionary VTX Series to the industry.

“We chose to purchase the JBL V25 because I think JBL has it spot-on for the future,” said Glenn Roggeman, CEO of the AED group. “JBL has always been known as the best component builder. Today, thanks to Paul Bauman, they not only have the components, but also the speaker boxes to make a terrific system.”

Audio XL, JBL’s distributor for Benelux, provided outstanding support, planning and execution of the event.