Usually reserved for premiership football matches, the Pierre-Mauroy stadium was host to a couple of firsts when the Orchestre Nationale de Lille (ONL) performed a concert marking its fortieth anniversary.
More than 16,000 people attended the event where the northern half of the pitch was lifted and slid over the southern half to provide an arena for concerts and indoor sporting competitions. It was the orchestra’s first time at the venue – the first of its kind in Europe – and the first time that a Ravenna digital network has been used on a live event of this scale.
‘It was an impressive set-up,’ says digital audio specialist Fred Blanc-Garin, who was present on behalf of the ONL. ‘We essentially brought in the ONL’s recently installed digital studio set-up that now features a Ravenna network, but we had to supplement it with additional material.’
The show used two Lawo mc256 digital mixing consoles – the first at FOH operated by experienced engineer and ONL veteran, Francois Gabert, who was also managing monitors from FOH, and the second console from Paris-based live audio recording specialist, Yasta, in a separate room for audio capture for recording and broadcast. The recording console was set up and operated by Delphine Hannotin from INA.
For the 100-piece orchestra and 200-strong choir, the ONL team set out a total of 78 digital microphones on stage, requiring ten Neumann DMI-8 interfaces equipped with Ravenna cards. Once collected by the DMIs, the microphone signals were packed into Ravenna multicast streams and sent to a network switch where the streams were automatically duplicated. One set of streams was received by the FOH console and the second went to the broadcast console, and then on again to a Merging Technologies Pyramix DAW.
‘It was the first time any of us had set up an event of this scale using Ravenna technology which needed to demonstrate flawless interoperability between equipment from several different manufacturers,’ explains Blanc-Garin. ‘As such, it was a lot of work but we were lucky to have first-class support from all concerned, especially Lawo and Neumann. The results were worth every second of the time invested – on the night everything worked perfectly and we all had huge smiles on our faces, from the technicians to the musicians and of course the audience. No other networking technology can offer this level of performance and scalability, and I’m convinced we’ve set the standard for the future.’
