Following a brief appearance on the Palace balcony, the investiture of the new King took place in the neighbouring Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, during a ceremony attended by members of royal families from dozens of countries around the world, government officials and key political figures.
During the afternoon, the new King Willem-Alexander and the new Queen Maxima boarded a boat for a two-hour ride, visiting a string of stages with performances and re-enactments of historical, cultural and sportive highlights in Dutch history.
With only around 100 days to prepare, top Dutch broadcast and live-entertainment professionals teamed up for the task of producing and broadcasting the official ceremonies, staging multiple venues with expected crowds up to 250.000 and facilitating 1100+ news crews.
Hectic days for pro audio specialist Audio Electronics Mattijsen (AEM), responsible for the sound reinforcement during the official Royal ceremonies at both the Paleis and The Nieuwe Kerk, while supplying production intercoms and wireless frequency management duties at the Museumplein, and wireless intercoms along the riverbanks of the boat tour.
The Nieuwe Kerk (The New Church) was the epic centre of the day, with all ceremonies, over 2000 guests and the Kings address to the Dutch people. Says Bart Joosse, AEM project manager, "The Nieuwe Kerk's complex seating arrangement, the Kings speech, combined with the church acoustics called for a precision public address system. Meyer Sound's UPJunior's and UPM's offered both the required performance, but also because of the self-powered nature, each loudspeaker is individually addressable. We deployed three Meyer Galileo 616 processors for a total of 48 zone-outputs."
A Riedel Rocknet audio network throughout the church was used to collect high-performance audio from the multiple locations, and distribution back from the Galileo's to all individual loudspeakers.
Prior to the widely broadcasted ceremony at The New Church, AEM's technical supervisor and co-owner Eric Mattijsen handled audio duties during the semi-private signing of the instrument of abdication in the adjacent Royal Palace.
Surrounded by world-famous Concertgebouw, the Van Gogh and Rijks Museums, Amsterdam's Museumplein comfortably accommodates 200.000+ people. Technical producer Sightline rigged a gigantic stage big enough to facilitate a full day of entertainment, festivities and a grand finale performance of Andre Rieu and his orchestra.
AEM performed dual jobs, providing the complex frequency coordination with more than 300 frequencies and dozens uncoordinated 'ENG-crews-on-the-loose' in consideration, as well as the complete communication systems between production, outside broadcasters and technical crew.
Says Daniel Kee, "When it became clear that over 1100 ENG crews were coming to Amsterdam, DVBT channels ad-hoc cleared regionally wide for special broadcast purposes, and motor-cycle, plane, helicopters and F16's with up- and downlinks, plus thousands of porto channels would be competing for space, you are talking about London Olympics-scale issues, but in the much smaller area that Amsterdam is.
"Up until the last moment we were working closely with the other major users , government and of course the NOS (Dutch public broadcast service) in order to make everything work."
With various artist bringing their own wireless mics and in-ears, AEM tied overline wireless intercoms to partyline and matrix intercoms, and also brought the new ultra-flexible Wisycom wireless mics systems. "The Wisycom MRK960's helped tremendously to complete the frequency
