Frankfurt am Main, Germany—February 2019… The roots of Rock gegen Rechts (Rock Against the Right) go back to the rise of Britain’s Rock Against Racism movement in in the mid-1970s. The April 30, 1978, Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park in East London was a seminal event that, by 1979, had inspired the first Rock gegen Rechts festival in Frankfurt, Germany. Thirty-nine years later, Rock gegen Rechts was once again heard in downtown Frankfurt, in a one-day festival staged in the city’s famed Opernplatz. The audience enjoyed the advances in live sound since the 1970s as they listened to the day’s music and messages delivered with power and clarity by Linea Research amplifiers.
Nearly 90 organizations were involved in the event. Its patrons included Vice Presidents of the Bundestag Claudia Roth and Petra Pau, Lord Mayor of Frankfurt Peter Feldmann, and other city officials. Thirteen musical groups squeezed into the 10-hour show. Between the music performances various organizations and sponsors of the event delivered speeches and video messages with statements against racism and exclusion and in favor of peace, human rights, and diversity. “The festival used culture as an ambassador of political content,” states Jörg Groh of Offenbach-based sound company Audiologic, who provided sound reinforcement for the show.
The show’s promoters were not certain how many people to expect but the crowd gradually grew until the square was packed with 10,000 attendees. The stage was a trailer platform 10 meters (32.8 feet) wide, with wings on either side for the sound system and a covered extension to hold Monitor World. The festival also managed to fit in a 15 square meter (17.9 square yard) LED wall and conventional and moving lights, along with the main sound system, delay stacks, monitors, front-of-house station, power, and toilets—all in all, a lot to pack into an urban plaza.
The speaker system consisted mostly of SLS ribbon line array loudspeakers, with low-frequency coverage from TW Audio and JBL speakers. “The decision to use Linea power amplifiers came after consulting our suppliers, Mathias Ziegenberg of Pro Audio Technik and Jens Seekamp from Audio Concepts,” Groh reports, “They convinced us of the advantages of the Linea amps, such as their amazing performance, Linea’s DSP platform, the access via Ethernet, and access to presets and key parameters via the user interface.”
A pair of four-channel, high-powered Linea 44M20 amplifiers was sufficient to power the main system. Each channel of the 44M20 combines advanced DSP and network features with up to 5,000 watts of RMS power (all channels driven simultaneously at 2 ohms), delivered with peerless audio performance, all residing in a 2U rackmount package.
Eight recently acquired Seeburg Acoustic Line X8 slant monitors were deployed across the stage. “When considering amplification for our new monitor system, we opted for the Linea Research 88C10 8-channel amplifier,” reveals Groh. “We get a lot of power in eight channels, fit into only two rack units.” The 88C10’s pristine Class D amplification can develop up to 1,250 watts RMS per channel.
Although the Linea Research amplifiers are equipped with Dante™ networking, as well as AES3 inputs, neither the mixing console being used at FOH, nor the monitor console had these outputs, so a conventional analog splitter fed the analog inputs on the amplifiers for the main and monitor systems. “The 96 kHz DSP onboard the Linea Research amplifiers was used throughout the system: for the subwoofer crossovers, for equalization, and for delay settings,” Groh details.
Rock gegen Rechts was not Audiologic’s first experience with Linea Research amplifiers but it was a step forward. “We had already successfully used the 44M20 for smaller events,” Groh recalls, “but not to the extent or at the event size of Rock gegen Rechts.”
The festival had to finish at 22:00 (10 p.m.) but the audience demanded encores, and it took about a half hour for the event to wind down before teardown could commence. That left less than three hours before Audiologic was supposed to be loaded out and gone. But the crew got the job done and everybody went home satisfied and fired up.
The success of the sound system at Rock gegen Rechts confirmed for Groh the effectiveness of Linea Research amplifiers. ”The price-performance ratio of the Linea amplifiers is a great thing,” he asserts. “We like working with their products.”
Photo Credit Frank Rumpenhorst