Radio-France choose Sy80

Paris – 21 September. Stade de France is not only a huge stadium for football events, but also a venue for high profile music performances by artists such as the Rolling Stones. Yesterday, it was the turn of the famous French composer Georges Bizet whose most famous work Carmen thrilled a demanding audience of 80,000 opera lovers with it’s lavish sets and powerful performances.

The event was also a significant event for live sound reinforcement because Bruno Lompech, responsible for the sound reinforcement at Radio-France, chose three INNOVASON digital consoles to mix the complex show.

At Front Of House position, engineer Benjamin Perru (pictured right) used an Sy80 for the pre-mix of the 80 singers of the Maîtrise de Radio-France and the 24 lead vocals, which were then fed to Laurent Fracchia (pictured left) who was mixing on one of the two INNOVASON Large Scale. As well as the vocal pre-mix, the FOH Large Scale also mixed the 76-piece orchestra and additional assorted inputs. At the monitoring position, Hervé Dubreuil and Alain Piart gave in-ear and wedge mixes to every musician of the orchestra, using the second Large Scale.
Unlike previous large scale events at Stade de France, for the first time a full digital transmission system was deployed to carry not only audio signals from the preamps on stage via coaxial cable (INNOVASON Stage Box system), but also to provide outputs to the PA system via a single CAT 5 cable, using to the new Digigram Ethersound technology.

The Stade de France is not an easy venue to rig due to its circular topography and the installation was made even more complex because of the different mixes and effects the director wanted the audience to experience. The PA system was built around 2 x 8 stacks of 5 Adamson line-array speakers plus 1 sub’, located on the floor and distanced from each array by 1/16th of the stadium circumference. Amplifiers, processors and one Ethersound ES8out module completed each stack. Each module was daisy-chained to the previous stack and the first was connected to one of the two Ethersound ES8in modules at the FOH console. There were also 4 zones of 100 volt speaker, feeding a total of 450 speakers spread around the stadium, and an additional 4 mixes for the house Alpha E Nexo sytem hung from the stadium roof.

And the sound? It was great!