Crida Fallas 2018

DAS Audio sound solutions and DASaim™ digital steering enhance the listening experience at the Crida, the official start to Valencia’s Fallas Festival.

Every year, Valencia kicks off its annual Fallas –a traditional festival held in celebration of Saint Joseph– with an event called the “Crida” (“call” in Valencia). A blend of performances, speeches, and fireworks, the Crida requires top-notch audio quality for the over 50,000 people that descend on the city’s Torres de Serrano for the festivities. Audioprobe, an AV rental and installation and event production house with offices in Paterna, Valencia, was contracted to coordinate the sound solution for this year’s Crida, and managers Javi Zaragoza and Jaime Castell, together with FOH technician Pablo García and event producer Alex Nacher, decided to draw from DAS Audio’s high-performance Aero Series of line array systems to bring the Crida to life.

The Audioprobe team deployed two main PAs of 14 AERO-40A loudspeakers each to provide consistent sound for the area extending from the Serranos towers to the bridge, flying the cabinets to cover the first 90 meters of the audience area. The AERO-40A line arrays, a compact enclosure designed to deliver both speech and music clarity, were augmented by 16 all-purpose AERO-20A line array systems to ensure full coverage for the audience congregated on the bridge.

Twelve DAS UX-221A subwoofers, positioned in a classic left/right configuration, were called into action to provide low frequency support for the show that kicks off the Crida, a set up that Pablo García, Audioprobe technical manager and FOH and systems technician for the event, said “more than exceeded expectations”.

Fourteen DAS AERO-40A were brought in to reinforce out fill and provide coverage to the exterior streets (about 100 meters of coverage), while 12 DAS ROAD-12A stage monitors set up on tripods handled front fill. The Audioprobe team also employed DAS Audio’s proprietary digital steering tool DASaim™ to optimize and enhance the listening experience for the audience, combining it with the DASnet™ control and monitoring application to produce more consistent results, including even frequency response and uniform coverage throughout the defined coverage area.

When asked about those attributes of the DAS Audio equipment that he found particularly compelling, García focused on two key issues: audio performance and control. “Thanks to the system updates and DASaim™ we managed to achieve an outstanding level of uniformity and voice intelligibility throughout the entire coverage area. The new curve and the improvement in the number of units make it possible to get the system ready with much less work on the EQ. Equally noteworthy is that everything was controlled by DASnet™ and managed by three DAS DSP-4080”.