Sound.Com tackles Indian Premier League opening ceremony
Published: ASIA
INDIA: Sound.Com recently designed and deployed an audio system using equipment from Optocore, Avid, JBL, Crown and Lab.gruppen for the opening ceremony for the Indian Premier League. The 120,000-capacity Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata was chosen to host the opening ceremony of the cricketing franchise, which featured headline act Pitbull.
According to Sound.Com MD, Warren D’Souza, the stadium isn’t an easy venue in which to design and deploy an audio system. ‘It takes a lot of experience, and one has to work through a lot of infrastructure related obstacles in order to put a system together.’
Sound.Com promptly sent a proposal to main contractor, Netherlands-based Poly Worldwide Entertainment. Sound.Com’s sound engineer Sunil Karanjikar and co-engineer, Poly Worldwide’s Fred den Dulk, with their respective teams, worked together to complete the project.
‘The belief that they had chosen the right audio company in India was established as soon as we opened our flight cases,’ said Mr D’Souza. ‘We had had everyone inspecting and admiring our Optocore digital transport system and our self-styled OptoRacks.’
The latter combined a large number of Optocore devices with Dolby Lake processing, and the Optocore network was wired in a redundant ring for fibre failure back up. Additionally there was an analogue back up to each amplifier position.
‘This technology has allowed Sound.Com to scale to any level of audio production, no matter how big the stage is,’ Mr D’Souza explained. ‘But nothing takes away from the human element – and the ability to integrate all this is the ultimate key to a successful show.’
A JBL VerTec PA system was rigged, driven by Crown ITech-HD 12000 and Lab.gruppen PLM10000Q amplifiers, with every loudspeaker element networked and controlled using the Lake controller and Harman’s Performance Manager.
Sound.Com deployed four OptoRacks, each comprised of one DD32R-FX and one X6R-FX (16 mic In) units. One each was positioned at the console, stage left, stage right and at a central delay position for the delay arc. Also available were Optocore DD32R-FX, DD4MR-FX, DD2FR-FX Madi interfaces, although on this occasion the event was not multitracked. Finally, the racks also housed a network switch that ran via a spare fibre link in the cabling, to help provide network control over the Dolby Lake devices.
‘Optical isolation allowed us to run the various positions on different gen-sets without having to worry about power induced issues,’ said Mr Karanjikar. ‘However, the stadium would get extremely hot and humid – as high as 38-degrees celcius – and so all devices had to be continually monitored for overheating. Though the network switches developed a communication error because of the heat, the Optocore devices performed flawlessly and we were able to use the System Ethernet option on the Optocores to regain control of the Lake devices which we had lost.’
For Pitbull, touring engineers specified Avid consoles, which Sound.Com supplied, along with the entire kit and backline gear for the act. The consoles were patched into the PA and monitors using Dolby Lake devices and the input matrix feature on the devices helped to match multiple consoles.
‘The main challenges were really logistics – weather, rigging, getting the gear into the stadium with West Bengal waybill bureaucracy,’ reflected Mr D’Souza. ‘Actually the business of putting the kit together and executing the show was a breeze!’
‘As for Optocore, the visiting engineer specifically commented as to how the network seemed a lot faster using this system than on a dedicated IT network switch,’ Mr Karanjikar concluded.