Sign up for 2024 tickets, invite your friends, win prizes!
To get you and your crew ready for Boomtown 2024 tickets on 11th October, we have a competition!
Sound has always been central to our Boomtown journey … the team’s passion for insane bass levels is very real but with over 100 stages running till 4 am we have to pioneer new ways to keep sound from escaping the festival site and up until now we have never quite got it right, especially when quick wind changes occur, but, we ARE going to crack it for Chapter 11 and here's how…
Chapter 10 was all about nailing the Boomtowns operations and infrastructure, we had big problems with this in Chapter 9 so needed to make things as slick as possible and we feel we nailed it. This year alongside sustainability, it’s all about sound levels. We have invested significant funding and resources into transforming the sound level experience and have employed the absolute BEST sound designers to ensure it happens.
Some insanely exciting developments are happening right now and there are currently two new sound designs being implemented for the two biggest dance stages... These solutions are ‘a world first’ pushing the ultimate boundaries, and designed specifically for Boomtown...
Who are these sound design wizards?
Straight after last year’s festival a team of sound designers and acoustic technicians were brought together to form the first ever official Boomtown Radical Sound Design Group. A specialist team of acousticians and engineers from leading manufacturers and suppliers from the uk and europe plus our own in-house noise management team who are renowned as the best in the business.
Their mission, that they chose to accept; researching new methods of sound system design and deployment of speakers, new groundbreaking solutions increasing bass levels in the arenas achieving a better sound experience for every single one of the 15,000 people dancing in front of the major outdoor stages… and no, it is not a simple mission of ‘turning it up’!
Where sound is concerned, we do have some very real, tangible and legal obstacles in our way… the sound limits on our license are the same as they were 8 years ago when the festival was significantly smaller, with fewer sound systems, venues and stages… we have to work throughout every single second of programmed music, across 100 different sound sources to ensure that our limits do not exceed those permitted to us… this is a MASSIVE task made even trickier by even the smallest change in weather having incredible effects on sound experience, for different people in different positions in front of the same stage, let alone the variants across the stages...
How is it different from sound management measures over previous years?
Over the years, we’ve pioneered all sorts of different techniques to be able to get close to the sound levels we’d like onsite, but keep it within the sound levels we’re allowed! We have used clever modelling, introduced hundreds of sound baffles (barriers to reduce the noise levels off site) and we’ve trialled brand new technology and as a result, despite how much we’ve grown we’ve been able to stick within those noise levels permitted nearly a decade ago… But whilst we’ve just about maintained our licenced limits and keep the majority of stages going at amazing levels, our main outdoor dance arena stages can often get hit the hardest, and the measures we’ve put in place have sometimes not fully addressed all the issues that we face - but these new technologies are set to make the monitoring system far easier and more manageable which will have an extremely exciting knock on effect to our overall city wide, sound management! We can't divulge all the details quite yet as they are currently under top secret development, but we will, and trust us when we say you will not be dissapointed! More details will be relesed in the next couple of months...
Boomtown 2019 will be A Radical City, in every possible way! We will crack it and the sound level experience is going to take your journey into another realm of excitement !!!
Massive love... Can’t wait to see you shouting to friends who can’t hear you across the dance floor this summer. xxx
