With opening ceremonies for the Commonwealth Games 2010, The National Games in Ranchi and the Oman Tattoo in Muscat among its sports credits, Indian production company Sound.Com welcomed the opportunity to take on the Indian Premier League. But Sound.Com MD, Warren D’Souza, knew that the multi-purpose Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata – the venue chosen for the event – isn’t an easy venue in which to design and deploy an audio system. ‘It takes a lot of experience, and one has to work through a lot of infrastructure related obstacles in order to put a system together,’ he explains.

Built in 1984, the stadium is the largest in India and the second largest in the world. With a capacity of 120,000, its astroturf surface primarily accommodates football matches but it has hosted athletic events and

To secure the IPL opening, Sound.Com sent a proposal to main contractor Poly Worldwide Entertainment: ‘The belief that they had chosen the right audio company in India was established as soon as we opened our flightcases,’ D’Souza says. ‘We had had everyone inspecting and admiring our Optocore digital transport system and our self-styled OptoRacks.’

The racks combine a large number of Optocore devices with Dolby Lake processing. The Optocore network for the IPL event was wired in a redundant ring for back-up. Additionally, there was an analogue back-up to each amplifier position.

‘This technology has allowed Sound.Com to scale to any level of audio production, no matter how big the stage is,’ D’Souza reports. ‘But nothing takes away from the human element – and the ability to integrate all this is the key to a successful show.’

A large JBL VerTec PA system was rigged, driven by Crown ITech-HD 12000 and Lab.gruppen PLM10000Q amplifiers, with every loudspeaker element networked and controlled using the Lake controller and Harman’s Performance Manager.

For the ndtwork, Sound.Com used four OptoRacks, each consisting of a DD32R-FX and X6R-FX (16 Mic In) units. One each was positioned at the console, stage left, stage right and at a central delay position for the delay arc. Also available were Optocore DD32R-FX, DD4MR-FX and DD2FR-FX Madi interfaces – although on this occasion the event was not recorded.

The racks also housed a network switch that ran via a spare fibre link in the cabling, to help provide network control over the Dolby Lake devices. Stated Sunii Karanjikar, ‘Optical isolation allowed us to run the various positions on different gen-sets without having to worry about power induced issues.’

The Indian weather guaranteed that the stadium would get extremely hot and humid – as high as 38°C – and so all devices had to be continually monitored for overheating. It was an essential precaution: ‘Though the network switches developed a communication error because of the heat, the Optocore devices performed flawlessly and we were able to use the System Ethernet option on the Optocore units to regain control of the Lake devices that we had lost,’ Sunil Karanjikar explains.

For the opening ceremony headline act Pitbull, the touring engineers had specified Avid consoles and Sound.Com supplied the entire kit – backline gear for the act as well. The consoles were patched into the PA and monitors using Dolby Lake devices and the input matrix feature on the devices helped to accommodate multiple consoles.

Summing up, Warren Dsouza put the event’s success down to the cooperation between Sound.Com sound engineer Sunil Karanjikar and co engineer, Poly Worldwide’s Fred den Dulk, and their respective teams: ‘The main challenges were really logistics – weather, rigging, getting the gear into the stadium with West Bengal waybill bureaucracy,’ he says. ‘Actually the business of putting the kit together and executing the show was a breeze.’

More: www.online-sound.com
More: www.optocore.com
More: www.lakeprocessing.com
More: www.avid.com