It's the speakers (and never the music) that determine whether you get a good concert experience. The speakers are the ultimate determinant of whether the audience has a party, falls asleep or gets into a fight.

Follow along here as you get behind the Orange Stage and into some special speakers that control your behaviour during the concert. Without you knowing.

Festival-goers look at the programme when choosing between this year's concert experiences.

I would now also take a serious look at the speakers, because they control how the audience behaves during the concert and how we experience the music.

Right now, Orange Scene is under construction, and with the iconic set-up comes some speakers that are the only ones of their kind in Denmark.

I met Paul Jensen, who has been responsible for stage technology at Roskilde Festival for more than 28 years.

The Orange Stage is being built and the empty scaffolding will house some special speakers.

Sound to prevent fights

On each side of the Orange Stage you will see a scaffolding with the easily recognisable Tuborg logo. It's the home of some insanely expensive speakers, courtesy of France's L'Acoustics.

They are built for large concert venues and the behaviour that comes with 10,000 people gathered.

Let it just be said: I would rather send my teenage son alone to the Orange Scene for his first concert than send him down to the hall where Disko-Kaj has set up some useless speakers.

Bad sound makes people cringe.

Bad sound makes us irritable.

Bad sound makes people fight.

Paul Jensen says that the French speakers, by means of a technological grip, prevent the guests from crowding together.

It is called a line array. You see it as long clusters of speakers hanging below each other. The trick with the clusters is that they cover the whole concert space with sound.

Ordinary speakers can't, so check your venue for speaker clusters before you buy your ticket. It's important.

Under construction. Classes of speakers bode well for the concert experience. Called line arrays, they cover the entire concert space with sound.

Avoid people moving towards the stage

When we hear a great orchestra, we intuitively want to get closer to the stage and have a more present experience. But not at Orange.

Here, many audience members stop their walk towards the stage, without even knowing why. Paul Jensen explains that the phenomenon is due to one of the advantages of the speaker classes. The sound doesn't get louder even if you walk to the edge of the stage.

The experience of getting closer to the music is simply missing, so many audience members remain unconsciously at a cosy (and safer) distance from the stage.

They get just as good a sound experience from being at a distance from the music, so one of the incentives for the audience to crowd together is simply removed.

Sound keeps the audience focused

60,000 people standing up to 165 metres away from a stage can easily find something else to think about than the concert they're attending. Once again, of course, it's the speakers that are responsible for connecting the artist and the audience.

At the Orange Scene, it's unexpected technology that keeps the audience interested in the music.

In the 18th century, the Frenchman Fresnel invented a lens used, for example, to direct and concentrate the light from lighthouses.

Jo. You read that right. Lighthouses.

The reason we can see the sky at all from a lighthouse hundreds of metres away is because of the lens Fresnel invented. Now translate the light from the lighthouse into sound.

Physicist Christian Heil has translated Fresnel's theory into sound waves, laying the foundations for Wavefront Sculpture Technology, the heart of the Orange Scene speakers.

People don't want to spend a lot of hard-earned minutes on something they can't make sense of. That's true in audio, too. That's why audiences need to understand what's being sung and played from the stage.

Otherwise, they'll leave.

Or come up with something else.

The special lenses make sure the audience can hear what is being played and sung, so they want to hear more. Without thinking about it.

Less wind sensitive speakers

When you're responsible for covering a 165 x 120 metre space with sound, like Paul Jensen, and there are 50-60,000 people in the open air, you face challenges that don't exist for speakers in the living room.

For example, it is important that Orange Scene faces north to south, because in Denmark we often have westerly winds.

That blows some of the sound away, but fortunately the 300,000-watt speakers work well in windy conditions. Paul Jensen says evening concerts under the open sky are a particular challenge when the temperature drops.

The heat from the crowd rises towards the night sky and can cause the "sound to smash" across the crowd, which is supposed to be a very peculiar phenomenon.

Speakers connect the audience to the music

When this year's headliner takes to the stage, they've brought along a number of sound engineers trained to use the speakers on the Orange Stage. They know the speakers for the tools they are and have worked with them many times.

At Roskilde Festival, there is no opportunity to do sound checks before the orchestra goes on, so it's incredibly important that the artists and technicians can trust that the sound is right, right from the first stanzas.

That's why the speakers are set up in a precise way that's always the same, no matter where you find them in the world.

It's the speakers that connect the audience to the music.

It's the speakers (and never the music) that determine whether you have a good concert experience.

What is the link between Orange Scene and SA?

Both are located in Roskilde. The city of music.

And 1 more thing.

About the bunches... hang on.

Here is an example. SA saxo 50

It has 4 bass speakers placed one above the other. A kind of cluster principle in living room format.

The 4 woofers (one above the other) ensure that the speaker sends fewer sound waves to the floor and ceiling, where you're never anyway.

When you want to experience the artists properly, you can't do without good speakers.

That's just the way it is.

Good festival!