…how to spend twelve days in Vienna a short excerp of Alex Schloessers article I have been involved with the Austrian pro audio scene for 18 years and it has always been very exciting and interesting, and the country, particularly Vienna, is rich in culture. Being german by heritage I´m still only a guest here, but have been welcomed a lot and supported even better. One of the main cultural events every year in Vienna is the VIENNA FESTIVAL WEEKS or WIENER FESTWOCHEN, traditionally opening in the first week of May and lasting for seven weeks with multiple theatre, music and opera performances. The grand opening ceremony is always held on a Friday night where the mayor of Vienna invites the public for a taste of local and European culture on a large open air stage downtown in front of the historical city hall, the Rathausplatz. The event hosts about 50,000 people live on site, plus millions on the screens as it is broadcasted live in three countries. This year the theme of the opening was “EUROPE SINGS” where the top eight choirs, which had participated in a European contest, each presented a song of their own choice and then the choirs together with the Arnold Schoenberg Choir of Vienna and the Vienna Radio Symphonic orchestra performed a few famous classical choir pieces from various composers, including Verdi, Haendel, Mahler and Beethoven. The job at hand was to produce and present all this on stage to a live Audience of 50.000 in a way that keeps it interesting for the listener and makes it a good sonic experience. The task to present this brings along quite a number of challenges and over the years we have developed a few good solutions to a challenging task. First of all, the acoustical space is huge with about 100 m width and more than 150 m depth. Second, it is a classical event with a substantial range of dynamics that are normally not suited too well for open air and amplified performances Finally, there are quite a number of inputs which need to be handled by the audio system. Doing the event acoustically with no amplification is impossible due to the size and the audience in attendance. Also, producing a classical orchestra and a number of choirs on an open air stage in a way that keeps the image and the idea of a choir and also of the philharmonic orchestra alive, is a rather difficult task. So how did we accomplish it? With the number of inputs in mind we decided to split the mixing task amongst three main engineers and therefore the idea of networking three main front of house consoles was born. Those three boards would then play in to a fourth board with multiple mixes and sources to play out the signals onto the P.A. system. The main P.A. mixing desk was planned redundant for obvious reasons. In this case we decided to use an all ALLEN & HEATH iLIVE system. The philharmonic orchestra was mixed on an iLive-144 surface with an iDR10 MixRack, the Choirs were mixed on an iLive-T112 with an iDR-64 Mixrack, and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir plus wireless systems and multiple other signals and feeds have been mixed on a iLive-T80 surface, iDR48 rack and an XDR16 expander rack. The main P.A. control was handled by an iLive-R72 surface with an iDR0 Mixrack plus iDR-16 as a back up redundant rack. All Mixracks and surfaces were backed up by computers running iLIVE EDITOR control software and all surfaces were accessible through iPAD via dedicated IP addresses on a wireless LAN access structure. That way, multiple redundant back up systems were in place to guarantee a flawless performance. When working with classical orchestras and choirs the sound crew never gets the amount of sound check time required to do the individual tunings and equalisations, so a system with two 64 track hard disk recorders was employed for virtual sound checks during the setup and rehearsals. That way, individual recordings of the Orchestra and also of the choirs were available for sound checks and further tunings once the artists had gone. The surround setup was handled by an ambisonic system that was fed from a stereo left and right feed from each of the mixing consoles with additional spatial information from a few dedicated microphones on stage (Choir hangers and Orchestra hangers). The production was quite an undertaking but the result and the response of the audience was very rewarding. The ALLEN & HEATH iLive systems performed absolutely flawless and having one platform across the production made things very easy so the engineers in charge could help or back each other up if necessary. No external signal processing of any sort other than the loudspeaker processing was required. The two Gerzon matrix systems used the iLIVE FX library and the ambisonic setup was handled by a dedicated computer with Ethersound interface card. Hearing the final performance on Friday night after ten days of setup, preparations and rehearsals was spectacular. I always encourage engineers to keep on trying and experimenting with the technologies that are available to us today! by Alex Schloesser All this led to quite a sophisticated audio network setup. A dual fibre optic link between F.O.H. and stage was installed and this was backed up by a single fibre optical link and two copper CAT 5 cable connections. The Fibre optical links were connected via redundant D-LINK switches, which had a number of VLAN systems configured, so that 10 VLAN networks have been available for various use between F.O.H. and the stage. A total number of 176 inputs was accumulated for this event. Those signals were actively split by KT active Splitters for P.A. and the broadcast OB van. The entire stage and P.A. system were powered over a large UPS to avoid any problems with local power supply. A container UPS with a 125 KVA capacity was employed for the purpose. As for the P.A. system, only very capable high power, long throw and systems with very controlled acoustical pattern were used for the job. A mix of MEYER SOUND, d&b Audiotechnik, RENKUS HEINZ and AS AUDIO loudspeakers were used. We used a center cluster of three MEYER SOUND MSL-6 for long throw, a number of MEYER SOUND SUBS and MELODIES for near fill through and twelve UPA’s for surround. © Article by Alex Schloesser Layout: ATEC Pro/Ursula Prochazka