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| Lab.gruppen bought the Lake technology and introduced it into the PLM Series |
Sound.com has been involved in some of the biggest events India has ever seen, including regular duties for the Indian Premier League cricket championships, the huge Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in 2010, and even a religious event last year that had an audience of 5 million!
With that diversity and level of event to contend with, it’s important for any company to invest in kit they can rely on, and kit that will be flexible enough to cope with any kind of event and climate conditions thrown at it.
“Lab.gruppen interested me because they have a fantastic reputation for being reliable, and they also sounded amazing,” said Warren. “I have kept it really simple in terms of what models I wanted, so right now we own the four channel models, the FP 10000Q and the PLM 10000Q. But between these two products, our Lab.gruppen kit has probably the highest duty cycle rate in the company; they are literally rented out on a day to day basis. The great thing about the product is that superior reliability you get from Lab.gruppen. You simply don’t need to think about it, it just works. It looks after you. That’s very, very important for me. I always tell manufacturers, if you don’t hear from me, assume you are doing fine. If you hear from me, then there is a problem!”
“A JBL house, Sound.com rely on the quality and clarity of every product to make each show go as planned, and while reliability is extremely important, it’s not the only factor The reliability of a product is paramount in this industry, in fact a lot of manufacturers did not even get a chance to make their way into our company because of that reliability factor. But another great thing about the Lab.gruppen amps is the six year warranty, which to me is fantastic. Some people don’t even understand how great that is. A lot of people in India just buy amplifiers thinking how much it is going to cost them, and I can tell you that I definitely bought the la amps thinking how much I was going to earn from it. I have never had to think beyond that. If these amps are going to be going out on average 300 days out of 365 days a year, then I am backed up for six years. That, to me, is outstanding.”
Having initially owned a stock of Lab.gruppen’s FP+ Series, it was a welcome addition when the PLM Series was introduced. “It was a great thing when Lab.gruppen bought the Lake technology, and introduced it into the PLM Series. This is a business of constantly evolving and adapting to change, so for us the FP provided a natural progression to the PLM Series.”
"Lab.gruppen interested me because they have a fantastic reputation for being reliable, and they also sounded amazing" |
“Honestly, a lot of people think about owning the product because it comes up on international riders, but according to me, I exploit the technology much more for personal use in the filed rather depending on someone else to spec it for me. I bought PLM Series because it works for me. I did it because it helps me do my job; it’s faster, quicker, easier and more reliable. PLM helps me build a lot of large networks, it helps me do big projects, and it helps me go far beyond what the customer’s expectations are.”
That exploitation of the available technology is something that Warren has taken full advantage of, and using his stock of PLMs in conjunction with his standalone Lake DLP devices, the many aspects of Lake Processing have given Sound.com an extra edge when approaching the live sound market, as Warren explains.
“In India, I would say that Lake Processing is not exploited to its maximum potential. Not many people have realised just what you can do by having many Lake devices. The fact that it is processing, it is protocols, it is digital transport of audio, it is redundancy, failover, it is just so many things. Lake, according to me, can work as a standalone product, but you can truly enjoy the processing power of the Lake when you use more than one device. If you are into systems and systems engineering, the moment you hit the MESA EQ, or a graphic, you just know its going to sound good, you know there’s not going to be any phase shifting. Put simply, Lake Processing is just a household name for very serious live sound and touring.”
“What I like about it is that I use my Lab.gruppen and Lake kit for every major production,” commented Warren in conclusion. “So it can be sporting events, it can be a global spectacular, it can be a major rock and roll concert, it can be political event, it can be a very important corporate event. So the product range is used because that no matter what the genre of work is that we do, it’s the same kit that we use, and it’s the same tools.”
“The majority of the time I have used it to its maximum is porting related events. When you do a concert, a lot of the time it is pretty standard, but in sports, we do amazing things with Lake, or rather, Lake gives us the ability to do amazing things in the field. Most of the venues, you cannot enter the field of play to go and even touch the devices. So if you have done the networkings extremely well, everything can be controlled within the Lake Controller, without having to physically go and touch the Lake devices. I think that’s the power of Lake, giving you complete and comprehensive remote control.”
