ProSoundWeb: The motorsport racetrack at Castle Donington in the English Midlands has been the location for a nine-year series of annual heavy metal, one-day outdoor concerts. At the last festival, on August 20, 1988, eight bands played, headlined by Iron Maiden using the biggest single-source PA system ever constructed. Rated to be driven by audio power in excess of 500 kW, it’s won an entry in this year’s “Guinness Book of Records.”
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Sometimes, you have to realize that there are people in the inustry you're in that are not only insane, but have the money to back up their insanity. The sound engineer for Iron maiden, I believe, is one of those people. The sheer size of that PA system puts some soccer fields to shame, but I have no doubt that its effect will not be lost on the audience, who by the end of Iron maiden's set, will be clutching their bloody ears in agony, every eardrum destroyed in a 5-mile radius around this monster machine. It reminds me of a sequence from the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy about a band called Disaster Area, which was a "plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones and was generally regarded as not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but also as being the loudest noise of any kind at all." The book goes on to describe that the best way to enjoy on of their shows is to be in a bunker several hundred miles away, or even better on a whole different planet. We'll see if Iron Maiden is able to take up the mantle.
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