Smoke and Mirrors SVL, Inc. Picks VUE al-12 for Chella Latin Music Festival

Produced by Goldenvoice, the same brilliant minds behind the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Indio’s Chella Music Festival brings together prominent and emerging Latin talent into a more intimate setting for a loyal local fan base. Held at the Riverside County Fairgrounds, 2019’s lineup included Tucanes, Chilean actress and vocalist Mon Laferte, Cola Boyy and local folk heroes Giselle Woo & The Night Owls.

Full production services for this year’s Chella festival were provided by long-standing Goldenvoice collaborator, Smoke and Mirrors SVL, Inc., who deployed a VUE al-12 Acoustic Linearity line array system for this year’s event.

“I’ve been involved with the Coachella festival for nearly 20 years, but this was our first year handling everything at Chella, including lighting, video and audio,” explained Sean Lyons, CEO of Smoke and Mirrors. “Several weeks prior, I attended an al-12 demo and was impressed with what I heard. I figured Chella would be a great opportunity to put the VUE system through its paces.”

For the 5000-capacity venue, Lyon’s design incorporated left and right VUE al-12 arrays of eight elements on each. Low frequency was delivered by 12 VUE hs-221 dual 21-inch ACM subwoofers positioned at ground level across the front of the stage.  Four al-8 acoustic elements were placed across the top of the subs for front fill.

VUEDrive V Series System Engines provided all power and processing for the al-12 and al-8 elements, while onboard VUEDrive electronics powered the subs. Allen and Heath dLive consoles handled both front of house and monitor mixes.

“The venue is basically a large concrete square with several recessed ceiling areas,” explained Lyons. “I did a basic design and then put the room through Focus to verify my approach. On game day, the system went up easily and performed just as modeled. I credit the presets in the SystemVUE software for making the whole process easy. The system sounded perfect from the moment we fired it up with virtually no tweaking.”

Several visiting engineers piloted the VUE array throughout the day. According to Lyons, both the al-12 and the subs received consistently high praise.

“You can’t help but notice how much cleaner the al-12 is compared to most systems out there today,” said Lyons. “And the subs are equally impressive—massive amounts of power from a modest footprint, and very musical. Pretty much every engineer commented on how great the whole system sounded.”

Having more than proven it’s worth; Lyons is pleased to report that the VUE al-12 will soon be a permanent member of his rental inventory. “I have access to numerous name-brand line arrays in our inventory, but I see the VUE al-12 being my go-to from this point forward.”

Photos Courtesy of: Smoke and Mirrors SVL, Inc.