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Austin, TX — Nomad Sound, Inc. has added four Radian Audio APEX-1500 stage monitor speakers to its rental inventory. The new 15-inch wedges were acquired following evaluation during the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX earlier this year, and bring to 16 the total number of Radian Audio wedges owned by the production sound company.
Nomad Sound owner Damon Lange has been using Radian Audio RMW-1122 12-inch two-way MicroWedges for about six years, he reports. The four new APEX-1500 stage monitors were added to the company’s stock because, he says, “We wanted to be able to offer a 15-inch bi-amped wedge to some of our festival clients. Some people specifically want the 15s.”
Lange says that he prefers the performance of the APEX-1500 wedge compared to its predecessor, the Radian Audio MicroWedge RWM-1152. “Tim Thornton from Radian Audio brought me some APEX1500s to demo before South by Southwest this past February. The APEX15s had a more high-fidelity sound, so we were pleased to add those in. I found that the high frequencies were improved and that there was a bit more clarity to the wedge without it necessarily sounding harsh.” Plus, he adds, “I like the new logo cut into the back of the APEX– it’s a good looking wedge.”
Although Lange travels as a sound engineer worldwide with various artists, his company focuses on theater shows and festivals in Texas, especially around its home base of Austin. “We’ve done Merle Haggard at the Paramount with pretty good results. We also did a festival just outside Austin called the Old Settler’s Music Festival in April with the MicroWedges and the Apexes on both of those stages,” he says. The Americana music, arts and crafts festival, which is held in Driftwood, just south of Austin, this year featured headliners Robert Earl Keen, the BoDeans, the Gourds and Travelin’ McCoury’s, plus many others.
Nomad Sound has had great success with the 12-inch Radian Audio RMW-1122 MicroWedges. “I find the MicroWedge 12s to be an exceptional wedge,” comments Lange. “I consistently have artists after festival and theater shows walking off the stage and thanking the monitor engineer, and saying they were some of the best sounding monitor mixes they have ever had. I’m very pleased with that product.”
According to Lange, “We generally provide eight bi-amped mixes plus a cue mix onstage at festivals. I found that the best results with the products are when they are either over-powered or bi-amped. We run our bi-amped wedges with Crown XTI 4000s, which we found to be an inexpensive but good sounding way to bi-amp them. We’ve also run them passively with Lab.gruppen FP 10000Q amps and had good results. Most of the time, we run single wedges per mix, but when an artist requires two wedges we’ll often run one vocals only, and the second with whatever instruments are requested.”
He continues, “We have our own custom processor settings that we’ve dropped into the Crown amps, which are a slight variation from the factory recommended settings, for the 12-inch MicroWedge in passive and bi-amp mode, as well as the 15-inch MicroWedge and now the APEXX-1500.”
The wedges have also proved to be very hard wearing. “They’re well built, and the finish on all of them has held up exceptionally well,” Lange reports. “I bought my first pair, a dealer demo, a good six years ago. I didn’t bother to buy a case for them for about two years. I have them all boxed up now, but it’s hard to tell the difference between those original wedges and the ones that I bought last year.”
Based in Southern California, Radian Audio Engineering is a leading manufacturer of loudspeaker systems and speaker components for permanent installed and touring live sound applications.
