Australia-based Norwest Productions reports the successful completion of soud duties at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies at the 79,000-capacity Maracanã Stadium for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Norwest Director, and founder, Chris Kennedy was on hand at the opening ceremony as he has been for more than 35 major ceremonies events since Sydney Olympics 2016: ‘When we did the Sydney Olympic ceremonies in 2000, I had no idea that this would be an ongoing business that has now become part of the company’s DNA,’ he says. ‘We have now done every summer Olympic opening and closing ceremony this millennium, other than Beijing – a total of four. I am sure that is a record that will be very difficult to surpass.’

The Norwest team for Rio started also worked the Sydney 2000 event – including FOH engineer, and head of audio at NWG, Ian Shapcott and Steve Caldwell the Norwest spectrum guru who designed and managed the implementation of radio devices with 3,500-plus individual frequencies.

Part of the NW Group of sound, lighting, staging, projection, LED and comms companies, Norwest designed the complex system in-house, and partnered with local firm Loudness to provide the audio requirements. Norwest has partnered with local companies at every international event they have done. ‘We believe that we should be sharing the experience and the economic benefits with local suppliers and crew,’ says Kennedy. ‘We hope that this leaves a lasting legacy after we leave the country – and we make a lot of great friends over the world.’

Over the 16 years since the Sydney games Norwest has developed custom specialist equipment and systems that ensure each ceremony goes perfectly. There is no room for anything to go wrong. ‘It’s all about backup,’ Kennedy  says. ‘With few exceptions the only things that don’t have a backup are the things that have two backups – such as the protocol lectern which feeds into the digital audio system, the analogue backup system and has a third RF transmission system. Combined with multiple capsules in the Røde designed and manufactured custom microphone a great many things would have to go wrong before we lost the IOC president Thomas Bach’s important words.’

Networking the ceremonies

‘As system designer we tried to keep the design as straightforward as possible, however the venue posed a few challenges, in particular the unfriendly cable paths,’ says Norwest Project Coordinator and Designer, Andy Marsh .

The main audio transport used an Optocore redundant ring network of decentralised devices in the form of a 24-node, 2Gb system, with the audio LAN using the second fibre pair in a 24-node 1Gb system. ‘We used all 24 nodes possible, and also handled delivery of feeds to the broadcaster.’

The Optocore set-up was designed in such a way that six nodes were stationed on the field of play, two of which handled the I/O from the different stages; the signals were converted to AES digital at every individual node, with Dolby Lake processors feeding the amplifiers.

Many of the signal runs approached distances of 350m – the maximum for a 2Gb network using multimode fiber. And this is where Optocore’s new R-series interfaces came into their own.

Norwest maintains a substantial investment in Optocore equipment and upgraded to the new super-efficient R series devices, with 2Gb capability, as soon as they became available. R series devices offer increased features and energy efficiency, reduced carbon footprint and a substantial decrease in cost and power consumption – as well as twice the bandwidth of their predecessors. The devices provide for 1,024 input channels per ring plus unlimited number of output channels – necessary for events on this scale.

In total, Norwest supplied 54 interfaces, including DD4MR-FX, DD32R-FX, X6R-FX-8AE/8MI, X6R-TP-8AE/8MI, X6P-16IN for the main PA system and further DD4MR-FX and DD2FR-FX for broadcast splits. ‘Norwest already owned enough R-series devices to run the entire network – with ample spares,’ Marsh says. ‘We even did another couple of point to point networks using spare devices we had there.’

Despite having a significantly lower budget than those of other recent Olympics, the main Opening Ceremony was praised by the international media for its vivid, diverse performances, emphasis on multiculturalism and its appeal to the issue of climate change.

To ensure rock solid delivery of the event, Norwest’s fully redundant system contained secondary consoles connected to an analogue backup system with Dolby Lake processors switching the system outputs. Signals were transmitted to up to 380 various L-Acoustics FOH loudspeakers for the main Opening Ceremony, powered by up to 164 amplifiers, for the FOH system alone.

Marsh knows that Optocore is unique in being able to deliver an event of this nature, and it continues to be their go-to solution: ‘We absolutely love it,’ he said. ‘It offers reliability, redundancy and extremely high quality signal transportation.’

The ceremonies, under the direction of executive producer Marco Balich, exceeded all expectations.