We Belong Here is an organization dedicated to building community, offering experiences in unique settings celebrating fashion, music, and entertainment in New York, Miami, and beyond. For the third year, they put on a highly anticipated electronic dance festival in Miami, Florida, bringing in headliners including GRAMMY-nominated, UK-based DJ and producer Duke Dumont, Bob Moses, Gordo, Tchami, Wax Motif, and more.
DAS Audio teamed up with Ft. Lauderdale-based production experts Light Up The Night Productions to create an unforgettable sensory experience for We Belong Here’s festival at Miami’s renowned Virginia Key Beach Park. The beachside event brought over 65 artists across four distinct stages, each offering a unique musical experience, with the main stage featuring 360 degrees of sound.
Light Up The Night brought the acclaimed ARA Series to the festival, outfitting the main “360 Experience” stage with the new speakers from DAS Audio. A total of 16 LARA self-powered cardioid systems with 12 LARA-SUB dual 18-in cardioid subwoofers covered the stage’s front area, while 16 SARA systems and 8 SARA-SUB cardioid subwoofers covered the rear VIP area. Front fill was provided by four AERO-20A two-way systems, and out fill was supplemented by a combination of AERO-20A systems and UX-218A subwoofers. The main stage had left and right stacks of three SARA-100 and one SARA-SUB that covered monitoring for the DJ booth.
As Jeff Taylor, Senior Pro Audio Sales Engineer for DAS Audio explains, “The concept was not to create a full 360-degree system, but rather to create almost a figure-eight setup, with a stereo PA in the front for the main audience, a stereo PA in the rear to cover the VIP area, and out fills on the sides. Besides being compact and easy to deploy, we were able to create a fully active cardioid rig, building a subwoofer arc across the stage rather than your typical left and right stacks. That enabled us to really focus the low frequency energy toward the crowd, without huge buildup on the stage area itself.”
DAS Audio also proved essential on the smaller stages. “We had two stages essentially facing each other,” reports Matthew Corrigan, Technical Director for Light Up The Night Productions. “With DAS Audio Speakers and DAS Audio’s ALMA software, we were able to control each system to achieve consistent sound and performance from every stage, everywhere on the festival grounds. And the DAS support team were so great to work with. These guys are total professionals, and they really know their stuff.”
As Glenn Wexo of South Florida Real Sound, head audio engineer for the festival, confirms, the DAS Audio ARA systems were the perfect fit for the We Belong Here festival. “The ARA systems are easy to deploy, they go up quickly, the ALMA software makes tuning and configuring the system really simple and intuitive, and the sound is fantastic – clean and clear in the top end, crisp and powerful low-frequency performance, really just a great sounding system.”
