The varied programme included opera, musical theatre, military band, traditional choral, and a headline performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Rigby and accompanied by soloists Wynne Evans (tenor), Elizabeth Watts (soprano) and Richard Morrison (baritone). The evening was also narrated by actor Robert Powell, featured the marching band of the Brigade of Gurkhas, and included a fireworks and cannons finale.
"With crowd coverage extending 365m deep x 100m wide, and due to the predominantly orchestral material, audio requirements reached 180 inputs. To compound this issue, the FOH footprint needed to be very compact due to crowd sight line issues," sayss SRD's MD, Stuart Roberts. "iLive was the obvious choice, as its flexible, distributed audio architecture makes it easy to build high capacity systems within a small footprint."
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was mixed on a separate system by specialist classical sound engineer, Ian Barfoot, who provided four stereo subgroups to both the FOH and Monitor consoles, which took pressure off the engineers and provided a better audio balance within the Orchestra.
The main FOH system consisted of an Allen & Heath iDR10 modular MixRack loaded with 64 inputs - 56 analogue and eight digital - connected to an iLive-80 Control Surface with a mixture of analogue and digital local outputs. There was an EtherSound digital split to the Monitor system, which comprised an iDR0 miniRack connected to an iLive-112 Control Surface with 24 analogue local outputs.
The orchestra system consisted of two iDR10 MixRacks loaded with 128 inputs - 120 analogue and eight digital - running in 'DualRack' mode, feeding 16 digital outputs - eight digital feeds to the FOH system and eight to locally required outputs - with 16 analogue outputs as back up.
(Jim Evans)
