Held during June, trials for the US Olympic Swimming Team were held for the first time in an NFL stadium this year – the Lucas Oil Stadium in downtown Indianapolis, home of the Colts football team – a nine-day event that was broadcast on NBC Sports and predicted to generate over US$100m of economic impact locally.

Previously held at the CHI Health Center Omaha in Nebraska arena for four consecutive Olympics qualifying trials, the new stadium location was able to seat 30,000 after the construction of two Olympic-sized pools over the football field. The arrangement presented significant live sound challenges that were addressed using a DiGiCo SD12-96 console supported by DiGiCo SD-Racks and SD-MiNi Racks connected via an Optocore loop, as well as a DiGiCo Purple Box Cat5/Madi-to-optical convertor. This set-up assured the entire audio system, including comms and feeds to broadcast, could be handled by the SD12-96 acting as a central audio hub.

‘It really is on a scale with an NFL Draft,’ says Caleb Cassler, Senior Audio Specialist with Dodd Technologies (DTI), which provided the live sound for the trials this year, as well as many USA Swimming Events since 1996. Dodd also provided a second SD12-96 and a DiGiCo SD10 plus an SD-Rack for USA Swimming ive!, an outdoor music stage that programmed DJs, bands, and presentations all week between trials sessions.

A combination of Lucas Oil Stadium’s permanent JBL sound system and additional Meyer Sound components brought in by DTI for the swim events turned the sound of the massive, enclosed venue into a huge distributed system, with highly specific zones for aspects of the event such as the warm-up pool, first-call, athlete entrance, athlete lounge, and massage room areas, as well as underdeck elevator positions, VIP sections, starting blocks, and athlete seating areas. Each of these required their own sets of loudspeakers and separate groups/auxes from the SD12-96.

‘Everyone – the audience, the swimmers, the announcers – had their own demands for the live sound,’ Cassler says. ‘The warm-up pool, a first-call room – all of those rooms have PA in them, but they also needed to have particular feel, in terms of content and volume. Then there’s the last-call room, which didn’t have speakers, but which was open to the main area so you could hear the crowd and announcements and music through the doorway as they got ready to enter. Every area was very particular, and the SD12-96 let me send each one a completely separate feed with exactly what was needed. The routing was very, very flexible, which it needed to be for this.’

Sometimes spaces also needed to be quickly reconfigured, such as when a diving space needed to accommodate a group of dignitaries for a meeting or a press conference.

‘Being able to quickly throw up new boxes or new groups and adjust things quickly and on the fly was critical for this,’ Cassler says. ‘If a new “room” appears out of nowhere and I need to add more speakers, I can do that without restructuring the entire console. The console is never the limiting factor.’

Further, the SD12-96 served as the hub for the live event’s comms, managing Dodd Technologies’ Riedel Artist frames and Bolero wireless units via a DMI-Dante64@96 card and an Optocore M12 Madi hub/switch to interface with the comm system via Madi.

‘The console can take pretty much anything that I would need it to, both in the cards and in the Optocore options. So I could just plug in Madi, plug in Dante, and then if I need to add something later, or someone wants a new feed, I don’t have to leave the console and start plugging stuff in.

‘I’ve already got 64 channels of Dante and 32-to-64 channels of Madi that I can move around from the console as needed. The Madi ports on the console were used for one local I/O to my computer for playback, LTC, records, and the like, and one via a Purple Box to ST using the house fibre network up to an SD-MiNi Rack.’

Another example of how the SD-12-96 streamlined a complex mission was the need for announcers to hear themselves without a delay from the PA system. ‘There was about a 250ms delay from the PA, making it hard to talk and understand each other,’ Cassler explains. ‘So I just dialled up a separate aux for them and programmed a button on their comms and they could hear whatever they wanted to hear and not hear what they didn’t want to hear. It all goes back to the SD. I’m using it as a giant matrix.’

That also helped with the four discrete video playback sources that were part of the inputs Cassler had to manage, half of which included time code, as well as sound effects, three wireless roving announcer/hosts, an anthem singer, violinist, quartet, and choir.

The US Olympic Swimming Team Trials presented just about everything a live-event production could demand of a FOH console and its A1, from Madi to Dante to AES67, plus a truly complex PA system that required numerous tweaks over the course of days.

‘On the SD12-96, I was able to hit every flavour of audio there pretty much is and handle it easily,’ Cassler says. ‘Anyone could throw anything at me they needed, and with the SD12, I could work with it and make it happen.’

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