Entering The Ring
Reinforcing opera in a large stadium setting
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Seventy-one thousand people recently converged on France’s national soccer stadium, Stade de France in Paris, to witness a great spectacle, lots of flowing movement and plenty of action in the penalty area. No, not France’s championship soccer team seeing off more hapless opposition in another tri-color-flapping victory. It was an opera. |
So that should be penalty aria, then. And, as it was Bizet’s “Carmen”
- an everyday tale of passion, smuggling and bulls - there were penalties
and punishments galore. But the fact that a sports-sized audience was
able to watch an in-the-round, cast-of-hundreds production like this was
down to some groundbreaking sound reinforcement, bringing together new
technology and techniques with a skilled, dedicated team.
There were two sound engineers at front of house (FOH): presiding over
the new InnovaSON Sy80 digital console was Benjamin Perru, in charge of
one mix comprising the vocal soloists and the Maîtrise Radio France children’s
choir; while Laurent Fracchia operated an InnovaSON Sensory Large Scale
board to mix the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, the choir and a
final overall mix, including the signals from the Sy80.
STEREO IMAGING
The FOH position was in the center on one side of the rounded rectangular
stadium, about halfway up and roughly where commentators commentate, VIPs
vegetate and royal guests hand out trophies at the end of a game. This
gave Perru and Fracchia a limited stereo image, which was repeated around
the arena to reach the entire audience.
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It was achieved by 16 ground stacks of Adamson Y- Axis Y-10 line array loudspeakers supplied by Parisian PA company Lagoona nestling between bales of hay in a rustic set and spaced evenly around the touchline. Commissioned by sound designer Frederic Viricel, Didier Dal Fitto of Adamson’s independent support company in France, DV2, came up with the concept after considering how best to match the listening experience to the movement and spectacle down on the pitch. “Considering the scenery, and the 360-degree presentation, ground-stacking seemed preferable to hanging,” says Dal Fitto. |
“The coverage area of each stack started at the seventh row of seating
and spread up to the back row a distance that varied between 60 meters
and 75 meters around the stadium. In fact, the stadium is not regular;
the east and west seating sides are higher than the north and south sides.
“Further, the west side also includes a restaurant with large plate glass
windows, while the north and south sides feature large video screens,”
he adds. “These needed to be avoided at all costs. With every part of
the stadium being so different, each array was quite different.”
All of the arrays included one Y-10 Sub, used as the base of the stack,
topped with five or six Y-10s. The total loudspeaker count came to 86.
Each stack included its own dedicated Lab Gruppen power amplifier rack
and XTA processing the latter connected in an RS-485 loop to Audiocore
for easy control access during set-up and the show itself.
The limitations of the stereo image clearly arose from the presentation
being in the round. Both Viricel’s sound design and the FOH mix engineers
would have preferred full stereo in every pair of arrays, but this would
logically present exactly half the audience with a reversed stereo image.
A compromise was reached.
“It was decided to mix the orchestra and vocals more or less in mono,”
explains Dal Fitto, “and the effects in stereo even though the arrays
are in stereo pairs, alternating left-right around the stadium. Accordingly,
the Lexicon and TC reverb returns and the sound effects in the main system
are in reverse stereo for about half of the audience.
“But the compromise was reached on the grounds that these are less critical
sounds, and it’s not quite so important that left is sometimes on the
right and vice versa,” he continues. “They are ambient sounds that create
a sense of space, but they’re not directly connected to any visual aspects
of the performance - at least not in terms of precise movement and action.”
CRICKETS LEFT OR RIGHT
Sound effects included a thunderstorm, rain and crickets fed also in
mono to the stadium’s 100-volt line system. “It’s not that essential that
a cricket is on the left or the right,” Dal Fitto notes with a smile,
“just as long as there is some kind of spatial suggestion contributing
to the background effect of night time in a hot country.”
In persuading sound designer Frederic Viricel to adopt the Adamson Y-Axis
range, Dal Fitto pointed to the co-entrant drive module, with its co-axial
entrance and co-linear exit comprising a high-frequency sound chamber
mounted within a mid-frequency chamber.
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“There are now around 30 line array systems on the market, but
only Adamson uses co-axial technology,” Dal Fitto says. “It’s a
solution that, as far as I am concerned, creates incredible coherence
in time between the mid range and the high frequency - and the result
is a beautifully natural sound for classical music, opera and jazz.”
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Dubreil and Piart received pre-mixes from both FOH and from two broadcast
trucks, contributing to 11 individual soloist in-ear mixes but consisting,
inevitably, of prefabricated “blocks” of sound from the huge range of
sources.
Overseeing all of the audio proceedings was Bruno Lompech, head of sound
reinforcement at Radio France, the national broadcaster. For him, the
operation was two-fold: live sound in the stadium, and separate, fiber-optic
audio feeds to a live radio broadcast on radio station France Inter.
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“We have two trucks: one doing a pre-mix of all the vocals on a
Sony DMX-R100; and the other handling the total broadcast mix on
a Studer D950,” he says. “The Sony passes sub-groups of the soloists
and the choirs to the Studer. We have to do this because there are
120 channels of audio coming in, and it’s a full-time job just to
manage the vocal channels.” |
The other was the orchestra and choir mix, created on the Sensory at
FOH and on the Studer D950 in the second broadcast truck. For their respective
audiences, the Sy80 and the D950 also synthesised these two elements into
a final mix.
The Sy80 took 24 main vocal inputs plus eight from the children’s choir.
Naturally these contributed to the mix in each of the Y-10 arrays, but
in a neat maneuver the soloists were also fed to the stadium’s 100-volt
line system. In this system, scores of monitors ring the stadium for announcements,
and for “Carmen” they provided subtle but very effective reinforcement
of the mids and highs of the operatic voices. Mounted on balcony railings
at three different seating levels around the stadium, they acted to all
intents and purposes as near-field monitors.
MATCHING TO SOURCE
While the soloists used Sennheiser wireless microphones, stage manager
Christian Lahondes placed a “who’s who” of microphones for the orchestra
and choir, each carefully matched to its sound source. The 82 musicians
shared one mic between two, ranging from Schoeps MK5s on the strings to
Neumann U87s on the brass, via Neumann KM184s on woodwind, AKG 414s on
double basses and Sennheiser MKH40s on percussion - while the first violins
all had a DPA 4032 each, mounted inside the instrument.
The combination created 72 input channels to mix, but that also included
Sennheiser TLM50s and Beyerdynamic 740s used for recording and broadcast
feeds. The adult choir was picked up using 12 Schoeps’ cardioid MK4Vs,
arranged more or less as overheads to capture the upward projection of
the 80 voices, while the same mics were used on the 20-voice children’s
choir.
Amazingly, everyone in the “pit” monitored through Adamson LX-10 side-fills
- with no feedback. “It’s possible because the console is so good, and
the engineers are so good,” comments Lahondes. “There’s no need for in-ear.
Furthermore, the mics can be used cardioid, omni, hypercardioid any
configuration.”
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“There are 18 10-MXs arranged in a big outer circle for the singers, dancers and actors,” adds Hervé Dubreuil, “and another 18 in an inner circle for the orchestra and choir - although there are also wedges on the floor for the choir. The orchestral monitoring is designed to emulate a symphony hall, because they’re all sitting in the open air with no reflections. It’s very dry. Plus, they can hear the stadium sound with a 1.5-second delay, which makes things difficult.” |
Dubreuil concentrated on the soloists, receiving the orchestral mix from
the broadcast/production. This mix added some reverb, but the overall
levels were low. “They don’t need a lot of program,” says Dubreuil, “just
a reference to give them a sense of the global sound. I can’t select individual
sections here, anyway, and they have no wedges. The circle of speakers
is intended just to re-create the sense of being in a large room.”
Radio France was also using Digigram’s 24-bit, CAT-5-based Ether-Sound
audio distribution system for the first time - but not for the broadcast
feeds, which used proprietary fiber-optic links. In a significant sound
reinforcement breakthrough, Ether-Sound was used specifically to supply
the FOH mix to the loudspeakers.
ROUTING IT AROUND
Montbonnot (France)-based Digigram launched its rack-mount EtherSound
units ES8in and ES8out the previous Frankfurt Musik Messe and used this
occasion to showcase the system’s capabilities. Any EtherSound network
basically a 100Mb Ethernet can be either daisy-chained or configured
in a star formation. For “Carmen”, produced in the round with all the
audio generated in the middle, a star was impossible so two independent
daisy chains were built, one as a back up.
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Two ES8ins and 16 ES8outs were used, with all of the output modules
carrying audio to the Y-10s and four of them simultaneously feeding
the 100-volt loop. The two input modules each took eight channels
from the Sy80, made up of two stereo zones and four vocal-only clusters.
These were then distributed easily to any part of the audio system,
with a fixed latency regardless of the programme, only 1.22 microseconds
were added at each node. |
The future will see how the industry adopts this solution, but it’s
certain that EtherSound’s fate is more promising than that of Carmen herself,
stabbed in the final act.
And if it takes six sound engineers to mix an opera, how many Frenchmen
does it take to refuse to change a light bulb? Non...
Carmen at Stade de France Equipment List
Main system
86 x Adamson Y-10s full-range loudspeakers
16 x Adamson Y-10 subwoofers
80 x Lab Gruppen amplifiers
16 x XTA DP224 processors
1 x PC computer for RS-485 control
Front of house
1 x InnovaSON Sensory console (96 inputs)
1 x TC Electronic M6000 processor
1 x InnovaSON Sy80 (80 inputs)
1 x Lexicon PCM-300 effects unit
1 x Focusrite Red3
Monitors
1 x InnovaSON Sensory concole (96 inputs)
18 x Amadeus MPB 600 R
10 x Amadeus CX 12
10 x Lab Gruppen amplifiers
12 x Sennheiser ear systems with
SR 3056 transmitter
12 x Sennheiser ear systems with
EK 3053 receiver
Microphones
Neumann
DPA
Schoeps
AKG
Sennheiser
Beyerdynamic
Audio distribution Inputs
2 x InnovaSON Muxipair
Outputs
1 x Digigram EtherSound digital signal distribution:
- 2 x ES8in at FOH
- 2 x ES8out located at the first Adamson stack
- 15 x ES8outs - one per Adamson stack
Wireless microphones
12 x dual receiver - Sennheiser EM 3532
12 x small body-pack transmitter - Sennheiser SK 5012
12 x body-pack transmitters - Sennheiser SK 50
12 x cellular headset - DPA 4066
12 x cellular Sennheiser ME 102
4 x omni-directional antenna
4 x tripod antenna
2 x antenna splitters
2 x antenna boosters
1 x Yamaha DM1000 console (for monitoring)
2 x Genelec 1030 monitors
2 x Sennheiser SMCD software
1 x Sennheiser 3532 scanner rack
3 x Sennheiser HD25 headphones
Phil Ward is a veteran audio journalist based in the U.K. He can be reached at phil@chimneyfish.freeserve.co.uk
December 2003 Live Sound International