No More Wine(ing)

It’s harvest time at Chateau Morrisette in Floyd, VA and that means today was the last event in their annual outdoor summer concert season. CareySound was honored to be chosen to provide audio for the series. The challenging event site is a large natural amphitheater built into the side of steep hill next to the winery. They expressed that they had never been satisfied with the sound in previous years as they tried various solutions from a plethora of sound companies. In particular they were concerned with the sound being able to project to the back third of the seating area at the top of the hill.


CareySound employed many new technical innovations to address their concerns and to help them to keep the series in budget. Reaching the far upper regions of the audience proved an easy chore for the powerful Dynacord Cobra 4 FAR boxes flown in the stages built in speaker bays. The near field coverage was handled with Cobra 2 TOPs sitting on top of EV Phoenix manifold technology sub cabinets. The system was powered with the new Dynacord Power H and EV Tour Grade amplifiers.

At the heart of the system beat the RSS V-Mix Digital System by Roland. With the new Roland V-Mix comes a whole new definition the term “briefcase engineer”. It’s not simply a digital replacement of a mixing console, but an entire digital audio system that only needs the addition of microphones and ‘front of house’ stacks & racks to complete the picture. It is delivered in two small cases that can be carried by a single soundman and includes; 48 mix channels, 16 aux/monitor busses, 24 channels of insertable comps, 24 channels of insertable gates, four stereo digital effects processors, system graphic eq’s, a digital two track recorder/player, a digital REAC baackbone carried over a single CAT 5e network cable, stage drop boxes AND, with the addition of a small laptop computer run wirelessly over Wi-Fi, a complete 12 mix monitor system driving our new powerful low profile EV Phoenix Manifold monitor wedges.

The stage sits at the bottom of a steep bowl and every piece of the system had to travel to the stage in a 4WD pickup truck. Even adding the time it took to get the system to the stage with the time needed to fly the Cobra boxes, it took only slightly over an hour to have the system up and running.

Appearing at this years festival were:

July 12:
Bob Margolin and Scott Perry

July 19:
Adrian Duke and Robin Wynn

August 9:
West End Mambo and Scott Perry (Front Porch Swing)

October 11:
The Catalinas and The Key West Band


John Carey - HE, Randy Hart - System TECH, Ken Carey - System TECH

Tags: Chareau Morisette, Floyd VA, Summer Concert Season, thedog.com, Roland, V-Mix, EV Phoenix, Dynacord Cobra