Anya Energizes Easterfest. Not the Neighbors.

For years, the organizers of the annual Easterfest event in Toowoomba, Australia, simply accepted noise complaints from residents near the venue as a permanent cost of doing business. Situated just a few hundred feet from nearby neighborhoods, it seemed as though spillover noise – and the public relations headache that accompanied it – were a permanent fixture to the event.

But not this year. In fact, Easterfest 2014 will go down as the first time in the event’s history that organizers received zero noise complaints.
The reason? This year, festival organizers employed Anya for their main sound reinforcement system. Anya is EAW’s fully adaptable system designed to eliminate the acoustical impact of any venue – indoor or outdoor.

Six Anya modules per side were deployed as the main L-R hang for the main stage along with 16x SB2001.KF740s were used for outfill, KF364s for frontfill and NTS250 and NTL720 sidefills. For monitors there was a full EAW Microwedge setup.

Anya’s greatest utility at Easterfest wasn’t so much that it can allocate sound anywhere that it’s wanted, but that it gives engineers the ability to NOT deliver sound where it’s NOT wanted.

“Here’s where the beauty of Adaptive Performance™comes into play,” said EAW’s ASG Specialist for the APAC region, James Bamlett. “The festival is held in a park in the middle of town, so noise pollution is always an issue. But Anya, together with a sub array offering excellent pattern control, allowed them to minimize the amount of spill into residential areas nearby, while still allowing festival attendees to enjoy the full sound experience inside the venue.”

Despite the Anya system’s track record for successfully delivering sound only where it’s wanted, event director Dave Schenk admits that he was going to have to hear it – or, rather, not hear it –to believe it.

“To be honest I was skeptical about the extent to which Anya’s pattern control would live up to the hype,” Schenk said. “The audio at the mainstage on day one was excellent. But the really impressive thing was that for the first time ever, we did not receive a single noise complaint during its running time and we didn’t make the slightest compromise on volume or sound quality in the venue.”