Moon Mother achieves atmosphere with RCF HDL 50-A

Moon Mother are a premium events production company who have been operating in Australia since 1991. As self-proclaimed ‘event architects’, Moon Mother have become revered within the events community as a talented and attentive team who are truly passionate about their work. Led by cheerful founder and directress, Jenny Moon, the company has been moving from strength to strength, picking up a multitude of high-end clients along the way- including such household names as Rip Curl and Cycling Australia.    
In keeping with the exhaustive quality for which they are now nationally recognized, Moon Mother have added a complete RCF line-array system to their expanding hardware catalog, provided by Group Technologies, the official RCF distributor for Australia. The system, consisting primarily of units from RCF’s flagship workhorse line-array offering, the HDL 50-A, was recently on display at Red Hill Estate’s Winefolk Festival in Mouth Martha.

Set up at the bottom of a hillside within the picturesque Briars conservation park, Moon Mother’s HDL PA could be heard right across the event space- where it maintained a level of intelligibility at distances that surprised even their own lead engineer. Flying from a brand-new portable stage, the team’s loadout for the day included 6 x HDL 50-A’s per side, with 4 additional HDL20-As providing front fill. Never one to skimp on ‘wow-factor’, Moon Mother also included 6 x double-stacked 9006-AS subwoofers, providing formidable low-end and breathing life into the Ska, Funk, and Rock featured in the Winefolk lineup.

The RCF HDL 50-A is a large-scale array module that integrates 2 x 12” woofers, 4 x symmetrical 6.5” midrange transducers, and two 2” drivers into a lightweight tour-grade housing. With a digital amplifier capable of bringing each unit’s SPL up to a staggering 140dB, the HDL 50-A has become a very serious contender within the modular array market.

Spruiking the benefits of the HDL line was Moon Mother’s own Business Development Manager, Tim Dalton. “We’re very happy with the way this system sounds- and apparently so are the audience- as we’ve picked up 3 more clients today, just from the sound of the system. Admittedly we were a little bit apprehensive whilst setting this up -as it’s our first time flying them on this new stage- but it turns out they sounded great right off the bat, and with a few tweaks in RDNet, even better.”

Moon Mother’s team used RDNet, RCF’s array management software, to scale the high-end as it ran down the stack, keeping the audio bright across the hill, whilst not being too abrasive for those in the valley standing right in front of the stage. RDNet was also used for shaping the low-end, as Tim explains: “The HDL’s RDNet capabilities just add that little bit of extra control, especially for outdoor events. We generally like running the low-end in a Cardioid pattern, but when we tested the system, we found a more Omni-directional shape sounded better in this situation- so we went with that for all the subs. That’s the kind of thing the HDL series makes easy.”