The opening ceremony, under the guidance of director Alexey Batkovsky, was based on Ukrainian history, with more than 2,000 volunteers and dancers involved in the larger performances. At the concert's finale, Shakira appeared on stage to a backdrop of spectacular fireworks before an audience of 50,000, including Ukrainian president Victor Janukovich.
The event's technical coordinator Vlad Voloshuk, from Concert Bis in Moldova, invited freelance system engineer Andrey Akhromeev to design a sound system for the event. Drawing on L-Acoustics' proprietary acoustic design software Soundvision, Akhromeev's solution consisted of 18 K1 boxes and 6 K1-SB subs per side, with side- hangs of 12 K1s per side.
"When I came to this stadium for the first time and saw the stage drawings, it became obvious that we needed a large scale system," says Akhromeev. "The biggest issue was that we couldn't use the roof of the arena due to weight limits. We also had to make sure we didn't block audience sight lines or put any visible obstructions or trusses in front of the VIPs. I made a few designs using different speakers and K1 seemed to be the only tool that allowed us to make this happen.
"Soundvision gave me the opportunity to prepare the system settings in advance, and LA Network Manager afforded us very flexible control of the LA8 amplified controllers.
"This system gave us very even coverage across the main seating area. The main hangs delivered nice, tight low-end to the very furthest seat. Vertical dispersion of the K1 is so precise that we were able to reduce unwanted reflections to a minimum, delivering a feeling of close proximity to most seats."
Infrasonic low end content was delivered by 32 SB28 subs, and the whole system was driven and powered by 16 LA-RAKs equipped with 48 LA8 amplified controllers.
(Jim Evans)
