What that TV audience could not have seen, however, was the complex work needed to distribute audio to the 35,000 artists, athletes, VIPs and other guests inside Turin's Stadio Olimpico - or how that work was made all the more difficult by the demands of television.
The audio show designer for the opening and closing ceremonies, Gary Hardesty of Sound Media Fusion, originally conceived a conventional FOH system which would have seen line-array clusters hung either side of the stage, with additional arrays being flown at various points further down the area, each one being given an appropriate delay. However, according to Daniele Tramontani, engineer for L'Aquila-based rental company Agorà, which supplied much of the sound and lighting equipment for the ceremonies: "This idea was rejected by TV broadcasters who didn't like the idea of large numbers of loudspeaker boxes being close to or around the stage. The solution was to adopt a distributed design, with line-array clusters being hung from temporary gantries around the stadium and further clusters and associated subs being installed at pitch level for content delivery and performer monitoring."
In total, 60 outputs of both pre-recorded and live performance audio were distributed in the digital domain across a fully redundant, fibre-optic network running the length and breadth of the stadium. Each of 42 line-array clusters used by Hardesty's design was given its own XTA DP226 loudspeaker processor because, as Tramontani explains: "The 360° nature of the venue, together with the need to have separate areas of coverage for pitch-level seating areas and stage monitoring, meant that we needed to have separate delay, EQ and other settings for each cluster of speakers."
The DP226, with its two-input, six-output configuration, is ideal for such a complex task, with 46 bands of parametric equalization available and a delay of up to 650mS being independently programmable for each output. In Turin, an optional AES/EBU digital interface was fitted to each unit so that audio data remained in the digital domain all the way from the FOH control cabin to the loudspeakers themselves.
During an extended preparation and rehearsal period prior to the opening ceremony, Tramontani was able to make fine adjustments to the DP226 settings remotely while walking from cluster to cluster around the venue, using a wireless PC tablet and XTA's AudioCore software. An additional desktop PC terminal in the control cabin was also fitted with AudioCore and enabled further fine adjustments to be made alongside the sound system's digital data and audio zoning packages.
The DP226s themselves were installed in racks close to the appropriate loudspeaker clusters and, although the racks were covered, temperatures inside the stadium frequently plunged below -15°C both before and during the Games - giving the XTA units plenty of scope to prove their ruggedness in the face of extreme weather, as well as their flexibility and sound quality.
As Tramontani says: "Designing a distributed system for a venue like this is always a compromise, but the digital network, the quality of the XTA processing and the ability to make such fine adjustments enabled us to attain very satisfactory levels of coverage and intelligibility throughout the stadium."
(Chris Henry)
