Lewis Capaldi — Sefton Park, Liverpool

On 15 August 2026, I was back in Liverpool working on one of the biggest outdoor shows of the summer: Lewis Capaldi at Sefton Park.

With around 30,000 people in the park, the challenge was to deliver consistent, high-quality coverage across a very large outdoor audience area. I was working on the system team for Adlib, deploying and optimising a large-format CODA Audio AiRAY system for the show.

The main PA was built around CODA Audio AiRAY, with the system split across the main hangs, side hangs and four delay positions to maintain level and tonal consistency throughout the site.

The deployment included 14 × AiRAY per main hang, 12 × AiRAY per side hang, 4 delay positions each with 8 × AiRAY, 12 × SCP subwoofers, and 8 × SC2 sensor-controlled bass extensions per side.

For a site the size of Sefton Park, the delay system was a major part of the design. Rather than simply trying to push more level from the stage, the distributed system allowed us to maintain clarity and impact much further into the audience while keeping the overall system controlled.

A large outdoor deployment like this is where system engineering becomes particularly interesting. Each section of the PA has to work as part of one system. The mains, sides and delays all need to transition correctly as you move through the audience, and relatively small timing changes can make a significant difference in the overlap areas.

One particularly useful finding came after the show while reviewing the alignment between the side hang and Delay 4. Adding approximately 14 ms between the side hang and Delay 4 produced a noticeably better transition between the two systems. It was a good example of why the final part of system optimisation is not just about what the prediction says on screen — walking the site, listening and verifying the result remains incredibly important.

There is always something special about working a major show in Liverpool, but seeing Sefton Park full for Lewis Capaldi was on another level.

Around 30,000 people in an open park creates a very different acoustic and system-design challenge from an arena. There are no walls or roof helping to contain the energy, audience depth is significant, and the system has to provide the required coverage while remaining consistent from the front of the field through to the final delay zones.

The AiRAY system handled the scale of the site extremely well, with the combination of AiRAY, SCP and SC2 providing the level, headroom and low-frequency control needed for a show of this size.

For me, jobs like this are exactly why I enjoy system engineering. The audience sees the stage and hears the show, but behind that is a huge amount of work: system design, deployment, prediction, measurement, alignment and then the final listening checks that turn a collection of loudspeakers into one coherent system.

A brilliant show, a huge Liverpool crowd and another great deployment with the Adlib team.