On Sunday, Feb. 12, nine-time Grammy Award-winner Rihanna performed her top hits over a 13-minute span during the halftime break in the football game pitting the Kansas City Chiefs against the Philadelphia Eagles.
The Apple Music Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show was a high-flying spectacle with close to 100 dancers joining the artist as she sang her big hits including “Umbrella,” “Work,” “Diamonds” and “Run This Town” on a suspended platform that rose higher than a five-story building over the 50 yard line of State Farm Stadium in the Phoenix metro area.
Unlike previous years where audio gear got pushed onto the field with rolling carts, ATK Audiotek/Clair Global worked with a temporary flown L-Acoustics K2 system that complemented the existing L-Acoustics system installed in 2016. “The NFL mandated that nothing be on the field this year, so that meant no carts,” said Kirk Powell, engineer in chief for ATK on the project.
The stadium’s existing house system included a total of 122 K2 and 32 K1-SB enclosures. ATK added six more identical arrays of 13 K2 over four K1-SB — three arrays per side suspended from the venue’s Brunel truss system — plus four sideline hangs of KS28 subs. ATK also flew two 10-enclosure arrays of L-Acoustics K2 plus a single sub hang of eight KS28 at each end zone. L-Acoustics LA12X amplified controllers powered ATK’s system, while LA8 amplified controllers drove the house system.
Powell noted that there were some advantages with the temporarily flown arrays over Super Bowl speaker carts. “Going in the air gave us more room, which meant more boxes — over 200 altogether, compared to the 76 boxes we could load on the carts — which meant more power and better, more complete coverage, even to the upper reaches of the bowl.” Buttressed with eight subwoofers deployed for the lower bowl, there was a lot of power and a lot of subs, and as Powell noted, they all got plenty of use. “This was a heavy low-end show.”
Signal transport was over Dante to Focusrite RedNet D16Rs interfaces and from them to the LA12X amps over AES. The system was rounded out by a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 audio consoles at FOH and an SD5 console used to mix monitors.
“This was a real ‘rock’ P.A. system,” said Dave Natale, who mixed FOH for Rihanna’s performance. Along with live sound for The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tina Turner, Stevie Nicks, Yes, Mötley Crüe and Fleetwood Mac, Natale has also mixed at FOH for the four most recent Super Bowl halftime shows.
The rigging challenge “limited where they could place hangs, which were mostly along the sidelines,” Natale noted. But on the upside, “it was one gigantic music system made up of the best technology and put together by people who really know what they’re doing.” As a result, “it didn’t just sound great—it sounded great everywhere.”
A Wireless Tightrope
Along with ATK Audiotek, Professional Wireless Systems (PWS) handled all wireless microphones and IEM systems for the pre-game entertainment, halftime entertainment and referees, as well as the NFL Honors broadcast.
For the halftime show — which marked her first live performance in seven years — Rihanna relied on Sennheiser’s Digital 6000 wireless system, singing into a MD 9235 capsule and SKM 6000 transmitter.
Shure’s Axient Digital and PSM 1000 technologies also played pivotal roles on and off the field, helping to delivered audio to more than 68,000 fans in the stadium and more than 113 million viewers worldwide.
In all, there were more than 2,000 frequencies coordinated over the Super Bowl weekend as dozens of simultaneous events took place in the Phoenix area, including the 2023 NFL Honors Awards, various VIP events, outdoor concerts and more. And as Sennheiser’s director of spectrum & innovation Joe Ciaudelli makes clear, this was more akin to a walk on a high wire than a simple walk in the park.
“Phoenix is a challenging city because it is the only one that officially does not have a vacant UHF TV channel. They are all allocated for broadcast, so there is very little spectrum available for wireless mics,” Ciaudelli noted. He added that although it is an indoor venue with a retractable roof, the stadium does not provide much in the way of shielding from outside RF signals.
The ATK Audiotek and PWS teams included broadcast mixer Tom Holmes, monitor mixer Tom Pesa, RF engineers Cameron Stuckey, Kasey Gchachu, and Gary Trenda and Loren Sherman, RF team lead for CP Communications.
Pesa credited the PSM 1000 along with Shure’s Wireless Workbench to monitor levels. “For the pregame, all three performers wore in-ears, including Chris Stapleton, who normally does not. With the two live guitar mics and live vocal, along with Chris’ slowly building and poignant rendition of our National Anthem, PSM 1000 was the right choice for the reverberant stadium,” Pesa said.
The RF team also relied on eight AD4Q four-channel wireless receivers and the recently introduced AD600 Axient Digital Spectrum Manager. “Each year we continue to push our wireless systems and have come to rely on Axient Digital’s ability to deliver,” said PWS’ Cameron Stuckey.
During the pre-game, Sheryl Lee Ralph, singer and star of ABC’s Abbott Elementary, sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” with a Shure KSM9 capsule on an Axient Digital ADX2 FD transmitter, and Babyface performed “America the Beautiful” using a Shure Axient Digital bodypack transmitter and a separate Shure ADX2FD for guitar and vocals. The DJ performances and choreography at the stadium also relied on Shure SM58 microphones with ADX2 transmitters.
Marc Martignetti, RF lead and owner of Digital Black, and Ryan Stotts, freelance RF A2, used Shure Wireless Workbench to monitor RF inside and outside State Farm Stadium throughout the pre, half, and postgame. “For the Super Bowl, a huge challenge is the available spectrum versus the tremendous wireless counts needed for onsite users,” Martignetti said.
FCC STA’s Now a Necessity
While it’s easy to take flawless wireless performance for granted, Sennheiser’s Ciaudelli noted that it’s anything but a given, and starts with a lot of careful preparation. “Thanks to their resourcefulness and diligent planning, the audio engineers and NFL frequency coordinators were able to combat the harsh RF environment this year by leveraging Special Temporary Authorizations (STA) via the FCC, along with some other workarounds,” he said.
An STA gives licensed wireless microphone operators temporary access to frequency bands that are not permitted for wireless mics. The engineers also leveraged channels occupied by low power or distant TV stations and used clever placement of directional antennas to further attenuate these unwanted TV signals, before being picked up by the wireless microphone receivers.
Without this planning and resourcefulness, the entire broadcast, including Rihanna’s performance, would have been at risk of audio dropouts and interference — a massive potential faux pas for her long-awaited showing.
“Even though it is called a Special Temporary Authorization, it is becoming so routinely used that they might as well start calling them Standard Temporary Authorizations,” Ciaudelli added.
A Massive Networking Setup
ATK Audiotek has provided live sound support for the NFL’s Super Bowls over a 25-year span, and “this is our eighth year using Focusrite RedNet with our Dante Audio-over IP network at the Super Bowl,” stated ATK’s Kirk Powell. “We started with a pretty small-scale Focusrite setup, but it’s grown over the years into the huge deployment that you see today.”
ATK Audiotek’s Focusrite gear setup for Super Bowl LVII included 20 RedNet D16R 16-channel AES3 I/O’s; 24 RedNet A16R 16-channel analog I/O interfaces; and 24 RedNet D64R 64-channel MADI bridges. A16R units were also used to connect with various interfaces operated by the venue and other entities, D16R units were used to interface with amplifiers, and RedNet D64R MADI bridges were deployed to interface with consoles and broadcast trucks.
Prep time at the stadium isn’t exactly plentiful, so ATK/Clair covers their bases by doing a dry-run setup at their home base in Valencia, CA, in the weeks leading up to the big game. “Because we do our extensive prep work, there are very few surprises,” Powell concluded.
