A recent concert at the Arena in Verona won an estimated 5.5m TV viewers and additional radio listeners to mark the tenth anniversary of Luciano Pavarotti’s death. Many of the artists who played with him during numerous editions of Pavarotti & Friends wanted to be on stage for this occasion to sing once again along with the Maestro – requiring a total of 226 channels from band, orchestra, choir, soloists and announcers, with 24 additional playback tracks playing the recorded voice of Pavarotti.
Italian production company Agorà supported the event using two pairs of DiGiCo SD7 mixing consoles at both front of house and on stage – both pairs comprised a console dedicated to the orchestra and a second for band and the solos. Two further DiGiCo SD11 desks were used in both locations to manage announcers’ and special guests’ mics. Two SSL L500 consoles used in sharing mode were chosen to handle the mix for the broadcast feeds reaching the Rai OB van and the national radios.
Daniele Tramontani and Stevan Martinovic, chief engineers at Agorà, designed the signal distribution system along with the support and suggestions received by Luca Giaroli from DirectOut.
Two solutions were chosen to enhance redundancy for the signal distribution. A full analogue transportation was provided through four DiGiCo SD Racks and eight SSL ML32. A second full Madi solution used the DiGiCo optical loop to feed the SD7 consoles and two DirectOut M.1K2 Madi routers in Doppelgaenger (mirror) Mode which collected the signals from the coaxial Madi outputs of the SD Racks and fed them to the SD11 consoles and two multitrack recording stations.
The 1024x1024 channels DirectOut M.1K2 routers were also collecting the signals coming from the playback rig and were distributing them to both the SD7 consoles and the multitrack recording systems.
The playback rig comprosed a pair of MacBook Pros (master and slave) connected to the Madi loop via two RME soundcards. In order to improve the redundancy level of the playback system and to ensure automatic and inaudible switchover between the sources, Tramontani and his team chose two DirectOut ExBox.Blds. BLDS stands for Buffer Loop Detection System, a proprietary technology that detects unwanted audio interruptions or corrupted input signals and automatically performs a reliable switch-over within a single audio sample.
The outputs of the two ExBox.Blds were connected to two DirectOut Split.Converters which were used to distribute the playback tracks to the M.1K2 routers to reach the ‘live’ and ‘broadcast’ environments. Since the broadcast world was running on its own clock domain, a pair of DirectOut Madi.SRC were used to resync the Madi streams.
‘Several DirectOut devices have been chosen for this live/broadcast event to ease the collection and distribution of lots of signals and increase the overall level of redundancy. And this makes us very proud,’ Giaroli says. ‘It was a pleasure to support Daniele and the Agorà team, long-time users of our products, and the success of the event proves once more the quality, reliability and flexibility of our devices, which can really adapt to any kind of situation, being it a live show, a broadcasted event or a fixed installation.’
