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One day late last fall, before the first snow, Nick Farkas and members of Evenko’s technical team headed out to Île Notre-Dame, set up a bunch of very large speakers in strategic locations and blasted music.

To their surprise, no one cared.

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“We didn’t get a single complaint,” Farkas said, sitting in his plant-filled, festival poster-covered office inside the Bell Centre.

Though they likely had fun doing it, the team’s mindset was strictly business. They were testing how sound travelled between potential stage locations for what will become the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival’s temporary digs for its 12th and 13th editions — i.e. next weekend and a year from then — while the event’s long-standing home on Île Ste-Hélène undergoes a complete, city of Montreal-subsidized overhaul.

“We wanted to get an idea if the (stage) placements were good,” said Farkas, who is Osheaga’s co-founder and Evenko’s vice-president of concerts and events. “We’re going to be there two years. We want to make sure it sounds as good as possible. I’ve been to tons of other festivals, and I hate it when a quiet act is playing on one stage and you can hear the other stage playing really loud. … It’s a huge preoccupation for us, trying to make the sound good on every stage.”