Gear Notes Sofia, Bulgaria
Gear Notes Sofia
Venue: Bulgarian State Theater, cap 3800 (sold to about 90%) designed and built in the late 60s during the communist era.
FOH
console: PM3500
speakers: THC line array box, 8 x LA215A hung per side with 6 x SW215 per side and a few PS212 per side. It’s a real “sound by the pound” rig, capable of extreme spl at the expensive of fidelity. More appropriate for hard rock than jazz. Amps were Camco V6s and Crown MA5ks with BSS Omni compact controllers.
MON
console: PM3500M w/ dbx 2231 eq
wedges: THC M115, 15″ and 1″, passive. Amps were Crown MA3600s. The boxes got loud, though had a tremendous amount of distortion in the low end driver and non controlable pattern control, particularly around the 800 Hz to 1.6k Hz region. While able to generate great amounts of spl, the box lacked fidelity and took excessive amounts of equalization to achieve results that were minimally suitable for this act.
The crew, though knowledgable and hard working spoke little english. Pretty typical for this part of the world. We arrived with less than three hours until show and were able to get a basic config up and going in a couple of hours, with enough time for the band to get a chance to slam out a tune or two on the rented backline that only a few pieces were per spec. Considering how late we were and how fatigued we were all in all it went well. The promoters are likely to be planning many more eastern European dates.