South Korean artist PSY recently drew a crowd of 35,000 attendees at the most recent Summer Swag tours.
This year's nine-city tour presented audio provider Seoul Sound with their most ambitious challenge yet: delivering pristine audio coverage across massive venues filled with elaborate water cannons and sprinklers, while accommodating surprise guest appearances from K-pop artists including Rosé, G-Dragon, and J-Hope.
PSY's Summer Swag concerts are renowned for their four-hour water play spectacles, though causing challenges for sound engineers as traditional delay towers would interfere with the water effects.
Soonil Yoon, FOH engineer at Seoul Sound, commented: "The artist and tour producers specifically requested K1 as the main system to achieve 130-metre throws without requiring any delay towers. With water cannons and sprinklers occupying much of the audience area, we had to rely entirely on the main hangs to provide uniform coverage to the entire audience."
Seoul Sound, working with sister company Klausys, an L-Acoustics certified provider, turned to Soundvision 3D modelling software to optimise each venue configuration.
The tour demanded unique setups for varying capacities, weather conditions, and the integration of water effects with live sound reinforcement while accommodating PSY's diverse musical palette spanning K-pop, rap, rock, EDM, and intimate ballads.
The Summer Swag 2025 rig featured main left-right arrays of 16 K1 and four K2 per side, with eight K1-SB subwoofers flown behind each hang. Side-fill extension hangs of eight K2 boxes per side handled wider audience coverage, while 14 pairs of Kara enclosures provided front-fill across the stage width. Fifteen SB28 subwoofers per side were concealed beneath the stage deck to maintain powerful low-end response while preserving valuable ground space for water-play effects. The entire flown system runs on LA12X amplified controllers, with ground subs and side-fills powered by LA8 units via AES/EBU network protocol.
PSY publicly acknowledged Seoul Sound's work during the Daejeon show. He gave special recognition to FOH engineer Soonil Yoon and the entire crew.