TWAUDiO returns for biggest ever Giessener Kultursommer

Drawing more than 30,000 people to the beautiful surroundings of Schiffenberg Abbey in the central German town of Giessen, the Giessener Kultursommer festival recently returned for its fourth and largest outing to date. Also returning bigger and better than ever before was the TWAUDiO VERA36 sound reinforcement system which has become the trusted choice for the event.

Hosted in the courtyard of the 12th century Abbey, Giessener Kultursommer has rapidly become a popular fixture of the regional cultural calendar. Every year the event plays host to an extremely varied line-up of performers from chart-topping bands to leading comedians, drawing tens of thousands of visitors from the surrounding area. This year’s event ran from August 23rd until September 3rd, with high profile headliners including Scooter, NENA, Gentleman, Johannes Oerding, Wincent Weiss and Roger Hodgson of Supertramp.

As in previous years, leading regional production company PS Sound was charged with providing a sound reinforcement solution capable of meeting the event’s unique challenges. With such an eclectic mix of artists appearing at the festival, the sound system needed to be just as capable of producing the low end thump required for Scooter’s EDM set as producing crystal clear speech intelligibility for the comedy shows and poetry slam.

Meanwhile, the remarkable beauty that Schiffenberg Abbey provides as a venue is matched by the challenge of its unusually wide and shallow audience area. In 2017, covering the entire audience with seamless audio required a substantial TWAUDiO solution providing 160˚ coverage courtesy of numerous VERA36 enclosures. In 2018, the physical expansion of the event required an even more powerful design.

“Giessener Kultursommer is constantly growing – over the past four years the shows have gotten bigger and the audiences have as well,” explains PS Sound System Tech, Jan-Niklas Volk. “In comparison to last year, we needed to bring the standard of sound reinforcement up to the level of the bigger shows we handle.”

That required, he continues, “adding an additional VERA36 enclosure per side to the main arrays plus changing the out-fills from last year’s T24Ns to VERA10 arrays, thereby achieving a better long throw to meet the larger scale of the audience area at the sides.” VERA10 arrays were also deployed as near-fields in place of last year’s T20 speakers, while the low-end configuration was transformed from 2017’s end-fire set-up to a far larger cardioid solution.

The completed rig comprised left-right hangs with nine VERA36 per side accompanied by eight per-side VERA10 out-fills and four 120° VERA10 elements deployed across the stage as near-fills. Low-end was delivered by a 12 S33 subwoofers and six BSX units.

“All of the subs were driven in cardioid mode and spread equidistantly across the 13m of the stage,” says Volk. “Adding some delay to the outer subs opened the sub-array to perfectly fit the width of the audience zone. I really enjoyed this improvement to the subs – the combination of S33 and BSX worked well.

“The S33 delivered the punch and the BSX added the feeling, all of which gained a lot of recognition from the visiting front of house engineers,” he concludes.

The event organisers were very pleased with the extended TWAUDiO system and overwhelmed by the positive response they received from the individual sound engineers.

Photos: © TWAUDiO / Jan Heesch