Sound.com wins gold at the South Asian Games
Published: ASIA
INDIA: Since providing the audio solutions for the Commonwealth games in 2010, Sound.com has added multiple major sporting events to its portfolio. The company’s most recent challenge came in the form of implementing the sound infrastructure for the opening and closing ceremonies of the South Asian Games, which took place in Guwahati’s Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium. Sound.com worked around a redundant Optocore backbone to construct a fibre-optic network for transporting audio around the stadium.
‘The audio system was designed in the round,’ explained Warren Dsouza, managing director at Sound.com, who was joined by Ranjeet Singh as the Optocore systems engineer. ‘The stadium was divided into six nodes — FOH, north, south, east, west and monitors in a redundant loop.’
The primary audio source was fed via AES to all amplifiers, while an analogue signal driven by Dolby/Lake processors acted as the secondary back-up, with ARX line drivers serving as the third back-up system. The Dolby/Lake processors were used foremost as a switcher from AES to analogue should a problem have arisen with the digital network.
‘We interfaced the Optocore devices to the Soundcraft and Yamaha consoles,’ said Mr Dsouza. ‘Signals were sent through the Optocore matrix through various nodes and Athletes Oath speech microphones. The Prime Minister’s VIP Tribune speeches were picked up from the X6R-FX 16 mic devices to the Soundcraft and Yamaha desks. The DD32R had AES audio signals fed into each of the amplifiers and in some places converted from AES to analogue for audio feeds.’
At both ceremonies, speakers, including the athletes, were picked up from Optocore devices situated in the west node and routed to the main mixing console, a Yamaha M7CL, via Optocore YG2 cards. Performances meanwhile, were mixed using a Soundcraft Vi6 console. Primary interfaces with the Optocore DD4MR-FX at the FOH were provided by the X6R-FX. The closing ceremony reportedly utilised Optcore M12 Madi bridges to interface between the Vi6 and the stage boxes at the monitor node, through the DD2FR.