Meyer Sound and Roskilde Festival Partner to Elevate the Concert Experience

	Innovative sonic collaboration illuminates Europe's premier festival.

This summer, Meyer Sound returned to Denmark as the exclusive sound provider for the Roskilde Festival, Northern Europe's largest and longest-running music and arts festival.

Held from June 29th to July 6th, this year's event showcased 200 shows on seven stages, all powered exclusively by Meyer Sound systems. Performers ranged from headliners like Foo Fighters, Doja Cat, 21 Savage, SZA, and Skrillex to emerging artists from around the globe.

Roskilde is immense in scale -- for one week, the festival transforms into Denmark's fourth-largest city and a haven for more than 130,000 concertgoers. The week-long event merges art, culture, and activism, offering more than 100 events that inspire action on issues from human rights to climate change. To date, the non-profit Roskilde Festival Charity Society has donated more than $59 million to social causes around the globe.

For Meyer Sound, these values make the Roskilde Festival a great partner in its mission to elevate the festival experience. "Being part of this festival is really special because we share the same vision," says Helen Meyer, senior vice president at Meyer Sound. "We believe in the sustainability of our products; giving back to our audience; and going the farthest mile, doing things better and different and continuing to improve."

Now in its seventh year, the Roskilde and Meyer Sound partnership aims to drive innovation in large-scale festival sound. This year-round collaboration focuses on scientific research and educational initiatives, culminating in the annual event, which both showcases cutting-edge sonic advancements and serves as a practical lab.

"Bringing in a manufacturer gives you direct access to R&D and tech support," says the Roskilde Festival's head of production, Lars Liliengren. "Being able to look at your stages with the knowledge you need to design the ideal system has been a key thing we've gained from the partnership. When you take someone on board as a partner, you learn something about your event that you didn't know before because they are coming in with a different perspective. So things just work because we share an open mindset."

"As a laboratory ourselves, we are very grateful for the festival's openness," says Katharine "Katie" Murphy Khulusi, Meyer Sound's director of loudspeaker development. "We come here with engineers and scientists, and we're able to run experiments, look into different ways of doing things, and continue to push boundaries."

The 2024 Roskilde Festival featured more than 750 Meyer Sound loudspeakers, provided by Denmark-based integrator Victory Event, Stage and Tour ApS. A complement of 276 loudspeakers were deployed at the mammoth Orange Stage. The system was anchored by 78 PANTHER large-format linear array loudspeakers, supported by LEOPARD compact linear line array loudspeakers and ULTRA-X40 compact loudspeakers. Fifty-four 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements and 24 900-LFC low-frequency control elements brought deep bass energy. Sixty-three PANTHER and 29 1100-LFC loudspeakers served as delays.

"The clarity of PANTHER was great," says Migui Maloles, who mixed front of house for Doja Cat on the Orange Stage. "I loved it. The stereo imaging was wide and really nice. I had a great time mixing on this PA."

"The system at Roskilde suited Doja Cat's hip-hop/rock/pop-genre music well," he continues. "Her music requires a lot of thump in the low end and the system had no problems reproducing what our source material calls for."

PANTHER systems also powered the Arena, Apollo, and Avalon stages; Meyer Sound LEOPARD, LINA, and LYON systems supported the Gaia, Gloria, and EOS stages.

"I was super impressed with PANTHER," agrees Khruangbin front of house engineer Jade Payne, who mixed the band at the Arena stage. "It was really easy to just get going. We showed up about four hours before the set, and right away, I noticed how even the low end was at the mix position. PANTHER rocks!"

2024 marked the Roskilde Festival debut of Meyer Sound's 2100-LFC low-frequency control element, which was deployed alongside PANTHER at the Arena, Apollo, and Avalon stages. "PANTHER and 2100-LFC were made for each other," says Murphy Khulusi. "We're really excited to be able to see how these two work together on a festival of this size and this scale."

While Max Jacomb, front of house engineer for Better Lovers, mixed at the Gaia stage with a LEOPARD, 900-LFC, and 1100-LFC system, he had the chance to experience the 2100-LFC during the festival and only has good things to say. "The 2100-LFC is a musical sub; it's not just a load of low-end information hitting you," he comments. "It sounds like what's happening on the stage, and that's what we're all here to do, is to make things louder and real."

Spanning more than 2,500,00sq m, the Roskilde Festival brings sonic challenges, not least of which is managing spill between seven stages. The biggest acoustic puzzle is the Arena tent, a massive structure measuring 84m across and 80m deep, with front of house located at the far back end of the tent.

"The key is aiming things downward," explains Bob McCarthy, Meyer Sound's director of system optimization, who led the design and tuning of the festival systems in collaboration with festival staff.

The tent's undulating shape and hard plastic surface adds acoustic complexity, says Liliengren. "It gives a reverberation to the tent, which can be nice, but you also need to tame the monster that the tent is. We've worked out some new solutions that we deployed this year; essentially, adding some eyebrows above the main array."

Installing absorptive drapery broke up cross waves and tamed reflections at front of house, while strategic array angling delivered consistent coverage all the way to the back of the tent before transitioning to delays outside. "This place holds 17,000 people, but there will be ten or 15,000 people outside of the tent," says McCarthy, who designs Roskilde systems using the MAPP 3D system design and prediction tool. "The low end has a really long extension because of the tent; you go outside and the low end sounds tiny because all of a sudden you're in a reverberation-free environment. So we added a subwoofer to every delay to make it sound full-range out there."

"I'm always happy when I get to a festival and I see Meyer Sound because it's trustworthy," says Jacomb. "I know what I'm going to get, I know I'm going to have a great mix on it; everything translates so beautifully." This outstanding sound quality meets the expectations of artists, engineers, and enthusiastic fans.

In 2025, the Roskilde Festival will inaugurate a new, larger version of the Orange Stage with improved load-bearing capacity to accommodate more complex stage productions and bigger sound systems. "Since 2018, Roskilde Festival and Meyer Sound have constantly elevated the audience experience for sound at the festival. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what we'll do in 2025 and beyond," says Liliengren. "We're like family," he continues. "I'm standing on the shoulders of giants who started the festival in '71, and they come from the same place as Helen and John and the Summer of Love, and it's all still a part of us."

Meyer Sound president and CEO John Meyer puts it in simple terms: "The whole idea is to make people feel they're glad they came. And that I think Roskilde is achieving very well."