Consultants to the Arts and Culture
BAKU 2015 EUROPEAN GAMES CEREMONIES
Baku, 2015
The inaugural 2015 European Games was hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea. The Opening Ceremony was created by Dimitris Papaioannou who was also the creative behind the Athens 2004 Olympic Ceremonies. Our work on the Opening Ceremony was honored with a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding live and direct to tape sound mixing.
Loudspeaker System
The recently completed Baku National Stadium was the venue for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the first edition of the European Games. The stadium seats 65,000 people.
The ground stacked system provided coverage of the lower and middle bowls and consisted of 12 arrays of six L-Acoustics K2 for the East and West, and 12 arrays of seven K2 for the North and South. Each array a sub-bass array of six L-Acoustics SB28 subwoofers. We also had six delay arrays of L-Acoustics K2 / K1-SB on the East and West sides to extend coverage to the upper bowl.
In total the L-Acoustics loudspeaker system consisted of 228 K2 elements, 132 SB28 subwoofers, 12 K1-SB, 12 ARCS II, 24 KARA, 20 12XT, 20 8XT, 30 5XT and 14 108P.
FOH Audio Control System
Our design is 100% dual-redundant using main and backup DiGiCo SD7 consoles for FOH, monitors and broadcast. The two FOH SD7's were packaged with a few key outboard devices such as TC M6000, Cedar Audio DNS-8D, Drawmer S3, Empirical Labs Distressor. Our mix engineer was Richard Sharratt.
Broadcast Audio Control System
The broadcast facility consisted of a pair of DiGiCo SD7B for the main mix and a pair of DiGiCo SD9B for audience and effects mics. 40 channels of audience mics were deployed with shotgun mics for the upper bowl and various mic types for the lower bowl. Our broadcast mix engineer was Andy Rose with assistance from Griff Hewis.
Patch, signal transport systems and RF
The audio control system was based on our design for the Sochi 2014 Ceremonies with some modifications to suit particular needs of this project. The signal transport network was based on an Optocore main network and an analog backup network. The Optocore system connects to the main consoles via MADI with DiGiCo SD racks connecting to the backup consoles, also via MADI, allowing the main and backup pairs of consoles to be mirrored. Our senior systems engineer was Justin Arthur.
Audio Replay System
The digital audio replay system for Baku 2015 consisted of a pair of Fairlight systems each with a pair of HP Z840 workstations and Fairlight Crystal Core processors. This gives sufficient processing power for 256 channels per PC. The system is configured in an A/B arrangement with a complete 100% backup. The system was operated by Steve Logan and Luis Miranda.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The people and companies that made it happen.
Thanks to our friends from FiveCurrents for getting us involved in the project. Congratulations to the creative team for developing such a great set of ceremonies and to the technical team led by James Lee and Nick Eltis for making it happen.
Our Client
Scott Willsallen designed the systems and led the team consisting of Richard Sharratt on FOH, Steve Logan and Luis Miranda on Replay, Justin Arthur looking after systems and Andy Rose and Griff Hewis on Broadcast.
Our Team
Congratulations to Giulio Rovelli and the whole team at Agora for preparing, shipping and installing a world-class system with world class crew.