Begun in 1985 by Pope John Paul II, World Youth Day moves each year to a different country. This year, after repeated rescheduling due to the coronavirus pandemic, it drew a 1.5m-strong audience to Lisbon’s Parque Tejo, in Portugal. Those attending prayed, sang and danced to the sound of 109 PA towers hosting a total of 1.100 loudspeaker systems driven by 327 amplifiers, connected by103km of optical fibre using 300 network switches.
Portuguese company Pixel Light Audiovisuals provided rental support for the event. ‘You can only plan and run such a critical event project with the tools that you know in depth, tools that have won your full trust and confidence,’ says System Tech/Sound Engineer, Rafael Pereira. ‘We implemented Outline Newtons in our workflow at Pixel Light already in 2019, and never looked back, thanks to its unrivalled flexibility with signals’ matrix, routing and EQ.’
‘The area is huge,’ he says of the World Youth Day 2023 site. ‘The calculations I carried out returned a clear and simple indication – it needed nine feeds spaced at pre-arranged delay intervals, across a range of 0-8s, each of them injected into a Dante channel, then fed to towers via Neutrik end-nodes. I ran a test set-up as proof of concept using standard Newton units. The design worked. It passed muster and showed that you can reach 8s delays with links and hops across different channels and different devices.
‘In an event of this relevance, with people having travelled the whole world to be here, the ultimate system’s purpose is two-fold – total transparency for the voice of the Pope, and total dependability of the signal chain against the safety-critical issues. At such a huge gathering, you want the shortest chain, not a longer one.’
Outline was quick to respond to Pereira’s request for modifications to the Newton units. ‘It appears that they understood the application, as they didn’t try to talk me out of my request, nor try to figure whether I could achieve the same goal from a different approach – competence doesn’t often rhyme with flexibility,’ he says. ‘Outline turned out easy to deal with, and after they ironed out some software versioning hiccups, I had two Newtons running a special Pope Delay modification’.
See also:
Optocore relays Pope’s address at World Youth Day
