This was the 15th edition of the Cup since its establishment in 1995, and the event in the United Arab Emirates was the second tournament to take place outside Brazil.
System designer was Almoe's head of audio, Bruno Vitanza, who relied heavily on Martin Audio's DISPLAY software to make all the acoustical predictions for the purpose-built beach soccer stadium, which was designed to accommodate nearly 6,000 spectators. "DISPLAY was a great help," he said. "I just had to 'virtually rig' the system on my PC and then when I did it for real I knew the line array would perfectly cover the areas I wanted ... in just one take."
For the main pitch Almoe fielded 16 W8LM Mini Line Array enclosures and eight WLXGS subwoofers, divided in two towers with two rigs on each. "Each tower had six W8LM to cover the central and side grandstand and two W8LM's to cover the top seats for the side stands," said Vitanza. "One of the client's requirements was to leave unaffected the playing field as far as possible, and this we did."
Further coverage was provided for the VVIP area, where the Crown Prince and members of the royal family sat - each speaker individually powered and digitally controlled to add time delay and filters in order to complement the line array.
Martin Audio's DX1.5 dedicated loudspeaker management system provided control, along with a pair of Lab.Gruppen FP10000Q amplifiers in each tower - so that just one signal line was required to each tower.
The programme feeds consisted of live DJ, video, animations and commentator announcements.
Almoe's senior audio engineer used Smaart to calibrate the system. "During rehearsals I was asked to increase the volume to a maximum level without distortion and it was incredibly loud for the size of those boxes, and sounded so good," reports Bruno Vitanza. "The FIFA FBC director stated that he seriously doubted that they would run the system at this level, so we had some headroom to play with during the event."
The second pitch was a simpler task, and required eight W8LM and four WLXGS subs for coverage. Thus in total Almoe used 24 x W8LM and 12 x WLXGS subs.
(Jim Evans)
