When opened in 1993, the 216m diameter of the Fukuoka PayPay Dome (as the Fukuoka Dome) made it the world’s largest indoor stadium and the largest geodesic dome, as well as being the first multi-purpose dome in Japan to incorporate a retractable roof. At a length of 188m, the venue also has the world’s longest bar from which spectators can see the playing field.
When it is not busy with the record books, the 52,000-capacity venue is home to the SoftBank Hawks baseball team, and hosts other key sports events, and stages concerts of the calibre of Whitney Houston, Madonna, The Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi. One of the most recent music events staged at the huge venue was the Fukuoka Music Fes...
For this, the array of Outline loudspeakers fielded by audio contractor Try Audio Japan was impressive – each of the event’s two adjacent stages had a main left and right hang of 12 GTO elements and 3 Mantas as down fill, with outer side hangs of 24 Outline Butterfly elements per side.
Each of the delay towers was loaded with 16 Outline Butterfly elements, and eight LIPF-082 lip fill speakers were mounted atop 40 DBS 18-2 subwoofers, aligned two-high along the stage fronts, which ensured a really beefy punch on the bottom end.
The Outline powerhouse featured T-Eleven, T-Seven and T-Five power amplifiers. FOH consoles at bands’ engineers’ disposal were a pair of DiGiCo Quantum 7s, a DiGiCo SD8 and an SSL SiX, while monitorland called on two Yamaha CL5 consoles and a Midas Pro1
‘The venue has a very long reverberation time of 8s at around 40Hz,’ says Tokihiko ‘Toku’ Tokuda, Try Audio’s system engineer at the event. ‘This could lead to a muddy mix, but I believe that these speakers can deliver unbeatable clarity in this sort of environment, and in fact we continue to choose this system because it has been well-received by clients at another reverberant venues.’
Since the reverb time was so long, raising the entire system’s volume would have created areas of reduced intelligibility, so Tokuda needed to increase clarity and therefore put a lot of time into calculating the exact position and distance of the delay speakers. Since the venue’s reverb was at very low frequencies, he found Outline’s OpenArray 3D software extremely effective in simulating even the lowest frequencies.
Regarding other positive aspects of the Fukuoka Music Fes, the system engineers had no doubts, ‘I think the Outline system created an environment that was easy to mix and, even though the bands’ engineers had little time to check it, they all found the set-up so easy to tune and so smooth that we were able to proceed right on schedule with the programme, thanks also to the two stages set up side-by-side, on which the event’s 11 bands alternated. In fact, after the event, enthusiastic satisfaction was expressed with the results achieved by all concerned.’
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