EAW MicroWedges Rock Coachella 2009
(EAW | Posted 2009-05-13)
Whitinsville, MA, USA - May 13, 2009 - The tenth Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April saw hundreds of performers across five stages, with a wide range of artists include Sir Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, The Cure, The Killers and hip hop pioneers Public Enemy, among many others. These artists thrilled the assembled throngs of eager music fans, and the artists themselves were thrilled by great-sounding stage monitors: MicroWedge (MW) units from EAW, a world leader in sound system solutions. More than 50 EAW MicroWedge Series MW12 Stage Monitors were employed over four Coachella stages by sound reinforcement vendor Rat Sound Systems Inc. To date, this was the largest outlay of MW units ever for a single event, according to Rat Sound President Dave Rat, who was the co-designer of the MicroWedge 12 (along with the EAW engineering team). For the last 18 months, the MicroWedge Series has been exclusively manufactured and distributed by EAW, under license from Rat Sound Systems.
Covering Coachella took a lot of monitors and a lot of manpower. A 30-member crew from Rat Sound was employed to ensure that the concert's sound was flawless day after day, night after night. The MicroWedge was a key component of the sound reinforcement system. "The MicroWedge is a great monitor under any circumstances, and I'm proud to have been intimately involved in its design," stated Rat. "It especially offers an advantage for festival sound because it's plug-and-play. And the sound is great - it's full range."
As Rat notes, the MicroWedge is versatile for different artists' monitoring preferences: "When you have so many artists constantly playing on all these stages, there's little time to mess around with tuning the monitors. The MicroWedge has great sound from the moment you plug it in. All artists want their monitor sound slightly different, and the MicroWedge has the range to accommodate that and it can do it at very high volume without feeding back. That combination of tonality and volume is incredible. Plus they're small, light and easy to carry and position on stage. Not to mention how cool they look."
