In charge of audio design and delivery for both live and broadcast was Scott Willsallen. "There's a bit of a travelling family for most big sporting events," he says. "It's a group of people who are very experienced in their own roles and at working together. I'm lucky enough to be part of it.
"These events are primarily about the television pictures. However, as they take place in the round, the audience is in the background of most camera shots, so the more engaged and enthusiastic they are, the more interesting it is for the viewers at home."
Scott needed to ensure that both the stadium and broadcast audiences enjoyed a high quality soundtrack to the ceremonies, whilst creating atmosphere for the broadcast. To achieve this, he deployed a tried and tested combination of equipment, which included mixing consoles comprising pairs of DiGiCo SD7s at FOH and monitors, plus an additional pair of SD11s at monitors. A further SD7 was employed in the closing ceremony rehearsal venue, so that the show file could be saved and loaded into the stadium consoles when required.
"We had two completely independent control systems in the stadium, the consoles acting as mirrored pairs," says Scott. "The primary system used an Optocore network, with 24 network devices positioned around the stadium. Eight Optocore 'nodes' were located around the field of play, plus four in the roof, from each of which nearby inputs - such as crowd microphones or local wireless receivers - were gathered and mix outputs were fed to L-Acoustics racks for the PA."
The secondary set of consoles all had SD-Racks located in a patch room. The field inputs were patched into a passive splitter, with one output going to the Optocore mic preamp for the primary system and a second output to a mic preamp with fixed stepped gain. A 25-pair Cat 5 cable ran between each Optocore node and the patch room for analogue connectivity. From there it was routed to a punch-down panel and an active splitter that allowed it to be split to the backup FOH, monitor and broadcast consoles.
"Using mirrored FOH mixing consoles feeding both signal transport networks meant that the mix arriving at the amplifiers via Optocore sounded exactly the same as the mix on the analogue cable," Scott continues. "We switched between the two based on AES sync, so if that failed the nodes automatically switched. If there was a failure on the primary consoles, we switched to analogue by hitting a button, then switched back when the primary network was running again. To test it, we switched systems a few times during the dress rehearsals and nobody noticed, which was very satisfying."
For the broadcast mix, two DiGiCo SD7Bs and two SD11Bs were deployed, again working as mirrored pairs. Integrated with the stadium system, all the crowd microphones were plugged into the Optocore nodes, which were fed to the Delta Media 3 broadcast truck, sub hired by Agora. Delta Sound's Griff Hewis, assisted by two Agora broadcast engineers, was systems engineer and mixed the atmosphere microphones.
(Jim Evans)
