In Dresden, the excitement was delivered in XXL format. Every time trainer Jogi Löw's team took to the field, around 12,000 fans assembled at the Königsufer on the banks of the Elbe to follow the action. To get them really geed up, the organizers (the City of Dresden and the company that produces the city's film nights) hired the team from Sound Light Event, Dresden, to provide the sound reinforcement.
"There were two major hurdles here to contend with," reports Dirk Schiemenz, the managing director of the Saxon rental company. "One was the size of the area to be covered and the other the nature of the signal, the TV commentary, itself, in which the level of background noise is generally extremely high and has to be controlled carefully." This commentary, however, infused as it invariably is with contagious enthusiasm, has an invaluable contribution to make to the overall experience. For this reason, the level of intelligibility - not only in Dresden but wherever fans gathered in front of the giant screens - was of decisive importance.
To provide the football-crazy fans in Dresden with optimum coverage, the team led by Schiemenz opted for Dynacord Cobra 2 systems to supply near and side-fill, two XLVC line arrays from Electro-Voice with XLE 181 elements flown from the stage roof, and PWH and V17 bass cabinets from Dynacord.
Amplification was delivered by P3000RL and TG7 power amplifiers from Electro-Voice as well as LX2200 power amplifiers from Dynacord. As stage monitors, SXA360 powered loudspeakers were used. Digital signal processing was provided by a DSP 244 and the entire system was controlled and supervised using IRIS-Net software.
(Jim Evans)
