After wrapping his six-month Mountain High tour last October, country music artist Dierks Bentley is back on the road again in support of his ninth studio album The Mountain with the 2019 Burning Man tour. Bentley kicked off the winter leg of the 27-date tour in Canada, making his way to Calgary, Alberta — the birthplace of the PK Sound Trinity advanced robotic line arrays and Gravity subwoofers that he has been using for the past year.
Bentley played the 19,000 seat Scotia Saddledome on January 26, representing a new peak for PK Sound, as the company got a chance to look back on the climb from its humble beginnings in a garage, to powering one of country music’s top acts in Calgary’s largest indoor arena.
PK Sound CEO and chief engineer Jeremy Bridge began building loudspeakers at home until he launched the loudspeaker manufacturing company in 2009, which now operates out of a 14,000-square-foot office space, warehouse and R&D lab. With a multi-platinum recording artist like Dierks Bentley using PK Sound loudspeakers, the show served as a massive celebration for PK Sound, as it expands its footprint into other music genres.
“Historically, a large portion of our partner’s successes and our own have been in the client-driven specification of PK Sound products on some of the largest Electronic Dance Music events in North America,” explains Darryl Ross, senior business development executive at PK Sound. “Being able to partner with Dierks however has allowed us to expand into different genres, and show the strength and versatility of our Trinity line arrays for any kind of live sound application.”
Dierks Bentley has been trusting PK Sound for performances in venues of all shapes and sizes. Making full use of Trinity’s three-dimensional wavefront technology, Dierks Bentley’s front of house and system engineer James “Pugsley” McDermott has control over the vertical and horizontal polar directivity of the entire array, letting him carve the sound field toward the audience while avoiding unwanted reflections.
PK Sound’s Kontrol software makes adjusting the sound field even easier for Dierks Bentley’s crew by granting remote access to each module’s internal functions, allowing each array to be flown straight and adjusted in the air. Once flown, PK Sound’s Kontrol auto-array feature communicates with each module and automatically arranges modules into the proper position in each array, removing the need for time-consuming manual arrangement.
While PK Sound has powered shows in venues throughout North America, never before has it supported a tour of this magnitude in its hometown, or had the opportunity to showcase its homegrown audio exports to Calgary audiences.
