The Kudo systems are serving slightly different purposes on each tour. Aerosmith, out on the second leg of its Rockin' The Joint tour, is employing its twin nine-box Kudo arrays as rear hangs for the show, which is selling seats in 360 degrees around the stage. Nickelback, touring in support of its latest CD, All The Right Reasons, is conversely using two arrays of nine Kudo cabinets each as auxiliary side hangs to address the left and right edges of the production's typical 270-degree seating configuration. All Kudo on both tours are, of course, powered by the LA48a amplifiers.
"The beauty of Kudo is its flexibility; you can easily change the dispersion pattern, not to mention fly it as either a line array or trapezoidal system," says Gibbons. "It's a superb unit and particularly brilliant for side hangs where the seating may be 240 degrees one night and 270 the next. The adjustability of the box is paramount for us in those situations so we're not wasting energy or getting reflections off the walls of areas where no one is sitting. Using the SoundVision software, our crews are easily able to adjust the K-Louvers in those boxes to provide optimum coverage throughout.
"The integral rigging of the Kudo makes flying them very fast and simple, which is especially advantageous in tight side hang situations like this where we don't always have a lot of space to work in. The compact size and light weight of the box also makes it extremely attractive to our production managers in terms of truck pack."
Like the Kudo, the LA48a amplifier also offered PRG a considerable weight savings. "We're carrying 44 of the LA48a out on the Aerosmith tour and it's actually saving us 4,800 pounds on the PA truck compared to our previous amplifiers," Gibbons points out. "Plus, they've been extremely reliable, so we're planning to continue to buy more and eventually move all of our L-Acoustics systems over onto the LA48a."
(Lee Baldock)
