Shanghai's JZ Festival main stage ran on six NEXO GEO M12 boxes a side

Left and right hangs of six NEXO GEO M12 boxes carried the main stage at Shanghai's 22nd JZ Festival, which opened on 16 October. Shanghai Haoyun Intelligent Technology Co. supplied the system, LSi reported. Alongside the arrays it fielded MSUB18 subwoofers, P15 point-source front-fills and PS15 stage monitors.

This was the largest edition in the festival's history. Mix, which dated the run through 1 November, called it China's biggest jazz event and the second-largest in Asia. The festival has been held every year since 2005, so this edition comes with two decades of growth behind it.

Across 17 days, more than 100 musicians from over 20 countries and regions took part in 146 performances and industry forums held at 13 venues. The top of the bill featured Victor Wooten & The Wooten Brothers, fronted by the five-time Grammy Award winner; Yuan Yawei (Tia Ray), a soul singer from China; Theo Croker, a jazz trumpeter from the United States; Wolfgang Haffner, a jazz drummer from Germany; and Don Byron, an American multi-instrumentalist and composer. The equipment described in this report was used on the main stage, which was one of the 13 venues.

For anyone who books festival sound, the useful details are which speakers covered which area and how much of the delivery the supplier handled itself.

One stage, three coverage jobs

The flown arrays covered most of the audience, with NEXO MSUB18 subwoofers extending the low end. Mix also reported something the other accounts leave out: Haoyun brought multiple DiGiCo consoles to the main stage.

Mix said the GEO M12 boxes were chosen for their directional control and their ability to provide uniform sound field coverage. LSi's account of the same hangs added high-fidelity audio quality to that list. Evenness is the common thread, and it matters for what came next, because uniform coverage is exactly the goal the supplier later gave for the front-fills.

The second job sat at the edge of the stage. Alvin Lu, Haoyun's sales and marketing manager, said the P15 point-source speakers were there to give front-row listeners the same clear, detailed sound as the rest of the audience, a "rich, clear, and detail-preserving listening experience" in his words. He said they fill gaps in the main system's near field and even out sound pressure across the venue. e-tech Asia's account simply called them front-fill reinforcement, and Mix described "a slew" of P15s covering the front row.

Put those two claims side by side and the design logic shows. The arrays were picked for uniform coverage, and the front-fills were added to make the sound pressure distribution "more uniform and consistent across the entire venue." On the supplier's own account, then, the hangs alone weren't expected to deliver that evenness down to the rows nearest the stage.

Two hangs of six GEO M12 boxes covered the audience, and it took a separate set of P15 front-fills to reach the listeners closest to the stage. For a production manager reading a rental quote, that's the case for listing front-fills as their own line item.

NEXO PS15 full-range speakers served as stage monitors. Lu credited the PS Series' high gain before feedback with letting each musician hear their own playing and the detail in the rest of the band, and he tied that directly to improvisation. He also pointed to the series' "classic stage presence."

Mix put the job in plainer terms: PS15 wedges faced the band, so each musician could hear themselves whether jamming, improvising or backing someone else. That is the third coverage job, and on a jazz bill it may be the most demanding one. A player can move from soloing to accompanying within a single tune, which suggests the monitors had to stay clear across both roles rather than just push volume.

Haoyun's work ran through handover

ProSoundWeb reported that Haoyun's job didn't end at delivery. Its crew handled equipment transport, installation, system commissioning and the final handover, and calibrated the system to the festival site before passing it to the production team. Pro AVL Central added that the calibration targeted the site's acoustics and performance requirements. It also said the handover was meant to keep the loudspeakers performing consistently across the run.

That consistency goal carries more weight over 17 days than over a single night. Fast and Wide said Haoyun's team and the festival organisers together ensured the system operated consistently throughout the event, and e-tech Asia described the handover as joint work with festival personnel. Read together, the reports frame handover as a shared responsibility, with the calibration done at load-in having to hold through more than two weeks of programming.

Haoyun's title explains part of this. Several outlets describe it as NEXO's exclusive fixed-installation agent for Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Fast and Wide said the company supplies a technical team that stays with a project from start to finish, along with the equipment. Mix's shorthand was that Haoyun provided both audio and crew for this year's edition.

The festival job sat outside that agency title on two counts: it was a temporary festival stage rather than a fixed install, and it was in Shanghai rather than the three listed territories. That suggests the start-to-finish crew model, not the territorial agency, is what Haoyun brought to this particular stage.

For festival producers working on a multi-week, multi-venue program, the point where the supplier's responsibility ends is worth settling in writing before load-in.

What the published spec can tell you

There's a limit to how far this account can carry. Much of the detail in the reports comes from Shanghai Haoyun itself, largely through Lu's comments. None of the reports describes how the near-field gaps showed up or how the team found them.

The same Lu quotes appear, nearly word for word, in LSi, ProSoundWeb, Pro AVL Central, Fast and Wide and e-tech Asia. Five outlets carrying the story is best read as one supplier account widely distributed, not five independent descriptions of how the stage sounded.

The reported main stage spec was two hangs of six GEO M12 boxes, MSUB18 subwoofers, P15 front-fills, PS15 wedges and multiple DiGiCo consoles. One supplier handled the job from transport to handover.