X Games — the World Cup of extreme sports — may not have as much music as Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Coachella, Outside Lands or any of the other seemingly endless seasonal music festivals that line up every summer like inbound traffic over LAX. But it does share with many of them a lengthy pedigree — this year’s Summer X Games that took place at downtown Los Angeles’ 27-acre LA Live campus from June 29 to July 1 was the 18th consecutive event — and, like several of them, it’s a fast-growing franchise.
ESPN, the owner of the brand, announced earlier this year that Barcelona, Munich and Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil) have been chosen as future X Games venues for the next three years. The new cities will stage summer competitions through 2015 and join current host cities Aspen, Los Angeles and Tignes, France, creating a six-event X Games schedule that will run from January to August in 2013. It’s a multi-seasonal franchise, with the Winter X events in Aspen and Tignes replacing skateboards with snowboards. You’d need an awful lot of E to handle Electric Daisy in Aspen in January.
Audio to the Forefront
In fact, music is only getting bigger at X Games. This year’s summer event saw Linkin Park do a private concert at Club Nokia at LA Live as part of a new initiative for the X Games brand dubbed X Games Music.
Starting next year, X Games Music will serve as a regular component of each global X Games event, matching music artists who fit the action-themed vibe of X Games with shows in all of its locations.
This kind of hybrid live show is becoming a paradigm for an increasingly saturated live-event market, agrees Ed Johnson, audio designer for the live elements of X Games for the last decade. “This show is a mix of sports and music and lifestyle, and it’s a constantly moving target to follow,” he says. One big shift evident with this year’s event is from live music acts to DJs, who seemed omnipresent this year, a reflection of the ascendance of dance music in the U.S. This shift was particularly apparent at the huge Red Bull tent.
The need to make the event sound good to both those in attendance and those viewing the games on TV can be tricky, Johnson notes. “The live sound has to be part of the broadcast sound, but it also has to be its own proposition,” he explains. Another challenge is the sprawling layout of the event itself.
A Multi-Ring Circus
X Games is a multi-ring circus — even though viewers at home will see only one venue at a time. The main venues include the Big Air jump ramp (inside the Staples Center Arena), the Rally Course (just outside, by the Hot Wheels stunt loop), the Vertical Halfpipe (in the Nokia Theatre) and the Event Deck, which is split into the Park and Street zones.
The Event Deck’s Park portion is a dry swimming pool with rounded sides for BMX and the occasional dirt bike. The Street zone is a compact urban park for skaterboys (there really are not a lot of girls in the X Games competitions but we’ll save that for the Psychology Today article).
In between the Park and Steet zone, there’s a tower. It’s here where On Stage Audio (OSA), the returning PA and related systems provider for X Games, has its FOH position. Within this tower, there are also two announcer booths, one for each venue. At FOH, a Soundcraft Vi6 controls JBL SRX 712M monitors and VRX 932 biamped line array modules set up as a multi-point-source type of PA system managed by a dbx SC 32 Digital Matrix Processor for DSP; it’s also used as a signal routing systems between the Park and Street areas.
“We have this broken down into 14 zones across the two competition areas to handle seven separate events over three days, plus all the stuff that goes on here in between the televised events, like Kids Day and Hometown Heroes events,” explains Johnson, who says the JBL wedges are flexible enough to be pole- or rail-mounted, making them an ideal choice for this less-then-typical sound environment. Bleachers on three sides ring both venues — the VRX 932s are positioned to blow directly onto them, while VRX 918 subs are positioned underneath the bleachers.
A Yamaha PM5D console controls similar components for the Big Air ramp; the events inside the Staples Center used the house’s newly installed JBL VT4888 line array with another Vi6 brought in for FOH; the Nokia Theater’s VT4889 house line array and another Vi6 console were used for events there; the Rally Cars event was covered live by four stacks of 4888 enclosures assembled on scaffolds and run through a PM5D. The awards stage (where winners receive their trophies and recognition) used a VRX 932 PA system with 918 subs through a Soundcraft Vi1 mixer.
Line Arrays Not Always the Answer
Johnson points out that the X Games layout dictates the use of several small but powerful PA systems using stacked or flown enclosures rather than just relying on line arrays (although Staples Center arena is equipped with hangs of JBL VerTec gear).
“There are just too many individual areas to cover,” Johnson says. “If you were to use a line array you’d need so many fill speakers that they’d be providing most of the sound anyway. We have to cover a large area.”
Along with Staples Center, the X Games takes up most of LA Live’s 27 acres. It also spills out onto Figueroa Street for the Rally Cars event. “What we’re actually doing is intensively covering a lot of smaller areas within that large field.”
That approach is also necessary to contain sound between venues, where overlap would be a distraction for attendees and TV viewers alike. (Johnson says it’s not unusual for sound levels to top 100 dB.)
Sound systems at the various venues, including PAs and intercoms, ride on a Riedel Artist Series modular matrix using S Frames and M Frames over Cat-5 cabling. Johnson says they switched to that from copper about eight years ago, before Riedel’s RockNet digital networking system was available. “It’s 24 kHz rather then 48 kHz, but that’s fine for our purposes, so we didn’t see the need to change,” he says. “So many things on this show can change at the last minute that any stability is welcome.”
Mix Masters
Cameron Grant is mixing the Big Air ramp on a 96-input Soundcraft Vi6 desk. The fact that he’s only using 25 of those inputs shouldn’t lull you into thinking it’s a cake gig. “The big thing I have to be aware of is staying ahead of what’s happening,” says Grant, who regularly mixes music, corporate and theater shows, but who is making his first appearance at an X Games show. His sources include a pair of voluble and street-savvy commentators who keep the crowds up to date on who is about to make the big runs down Big Air as well as the outputs of the DJ turntables that play one of the three songs that contestants can pre-select for their runs. “It’s like doing two shows at the same time,” he says, noting that he has to keep the level up in the competition area but assiduously avoid significant disparities in volume to prevent putting the broadcast compressors into Defcon 5 mode. “We’re doing a live event, but the main job is to get it to TV. That’s where it differs from a typical live show — instead of reacting to what’s taking place onstage, I’m trying to stay ahead of it, getting input through the comms from Ed [Johnson] and from the broadcast director and sometimes even from video, but always ready for anything unexpected that happens in front of me.”
Johnson, standing nearby on the platform, reminded that, while X Games has a schedule, it’s still unscripted. “People can get hurt any time, the weather can change at any moment — there’s a lot of unpredictability,” he says. “But you have to keep it going, because it’s live TV.”
Joel McLeod mixed the Moto events (such as Step-Up and Enduro X) in the Staples Center, through the house JBL PA and the rental Soundcraft Vi6 supplied by OSA. This environment is about as mottled as audio can get. Inside this enclosed hall reverberating with crowd noise are multiple motorcycle engines, two live announcers using Sennheiser headsets, a field reporter on a Shure UHF-R wireless mic, a DJ spinning tracks the cyclists are performing to, and audio from a Grass Valley server, comprised of various video clips and packages from sponsors and ESPN. Oh, and the FOH position was almost directly in front of the PA, barely 80 feet from one of the JBL VerTec hangs.
“What you’re really trying to do in this situation is tell the story of a sporting event that’s unfolding directly in front of you, but you’re dealing with tons of ambient sound,” McLeod explains. “I’m trying to push the announcer mics as hard as possible, trying to get as much gain before feedback as I can, but, at the same time, trying to keep the energy level up. Some of the sound is in the PA and some of it isn’t and it’s hard to tell minute to minute what that balance is.”
EQ and muting are two major tools and techniques for managing this much energy at these levels. McLeod has to follow the unfolding narrative to sense when the reporter and announcers are going to need their mics opened, while he’s carved out EQ curves for the music and other ambient elements, trying to keep them out of each other’s way and leave room in the middle for spoken words and keeping them intelligible, especially since some of those words may end up as dialog for the ESPN 5.1 surround broadcast’s center channel. It’s probably a bit like mixing a heavy-metal church service.
But it’s just another Summer X Games, which are only going to get bigger and noisier as the franchise goes global. It’s become a unique live sound proposition with its own techniques and challenges. At least Southern California’s weather cooperated, with a balmy 85 degrees and sun every day. Johnson, who also works the Winter X Games events in Aspen, was thinking about that when he mentioned what it’s like to see a meter at minus 10. “That’s not minus-10 dB,” he says. “That’s minus-10 Fahrenheit.”
