For the fifth year since it opened in 2007, Britannia Row Productions provided live audio for the NFL’s annual International Series game seen by some 80,000 fans in London’s Wembley Stadium — a venue Britannia Row has worked many times, including Live Earth, the Concert for Diana, Metallica and Foo Fighters, among others.
Before the game, which pitted the Chicago Bears against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, fans listened to performances by Goo Goo Dolls, Noah Stewart and Katherine Jenkins. Brit Row has provided Outline Butterfly line arrays for a variety of previous Wembley events, but for the NFL event they installed an extensive distributed system, typical of entertainment for athletic events.
The main system consists of a dozen 4-box arrays of Outline Butterfly enclosures, each stacked on a pair of Subtech 218 subwoofers, powered by Outline T9 amplifiers. The low, ground-stacked approach preserves sightlines for fans. Brit Row’s Dan Orchard headed up the project, with Kieran Walsh supervising wireless, Sergiy Zitnikov as system engineer and Stefan Krista managing stage audio for pre-game entertainment. Four more Brit Row technicians dealt with set up, operations and mic changes.
Both the U.K. and American national anthems — sung, respectively, by Katherine Jenkins and Noah Stewart — were heard via Shure’s Axient wireless, chosen for its audio quality and as a safeguard against dropouts. Each performer used an AXT200 handheld with a KSM-9 capsule. “Axient is a standout product in the sense that not only does it have excellent core audio and RF performance but it offers several new to the world features such as complete transmitter remote control and Interference Detection and Avoidance,” noted Shure UK’s Tuomo George-Tolonen.
All the transmitters on air had backup frequencies ready to go at a moments notice. They were also operating in Frequency Diversity mode, transmitting a single audio channel on two compatible frequencies at all times. “We could have taken a direct hit on these mics and nothing would have happened,” RF technician Kieran Walsh added. The remote control of transmitters also came in handy. They were able to remotely adjust the transmitters’ gain during soundcheck rather than physically hold them to make changes. “The time saved was noticeable.”
Roger Lindsay, FOH engineer, has mixed sound for International Series games every year since they came to London, mixing on a Yamaha PM5D. “This was the second time we’ve used Butterfly for this event, and I have to say that so far, it is comfortably the best-sounding system we’ve had,” Lindsay said. “Wembley Stadium is a difficult, reverberant acoustic space in which we have to achieve the best possible coverage across a very large area,” he added, crediting the Butterfly system for its “smooth response, achieved with minimal system EQ, and its excellent projection and even dispersion around the entire stadium” along with its compact size.
An event of this type incorporates large amounts of media. This ranges from the pre-game entertainment to video feeds, replays, referee mics, PA announcements, and live satellite linkups to other games in the league. NFL home stadiums are state of the art fixed installations designed to cope with the complexities of the game. Wembley Stadium in London was designed as a soccer stadium, a very different game, with different demands. This means that additional infrastructure required to deliver a regular season football game has to be built on a temporary basis, and incorporated with the fixed installation already in existence.
“Signal distribution around the field was achieved using Dante-linked Lab.gruppen Lake LM 26 and LM 44 Processors,” system engineer Sergiy Zhytnikov explained. “A total of 14 units were deployed,” one at each speaker array, one at the Front of House mix position in the stands and another to tie into stadium control. “The use of fiber optic cabling to deliver both Dante audio and remote control gave real benefit,” he adds, “instead of using over a mile of analog cabling which due to necessity would be placed in cabling conduits at field level, along with every other kind of electrical cable imaginable.”
In addition to electromagnetic immunity, Dante also solved the problem of signal degradation over long distances. Zhytnikov commented “Using Dante on the Lab.gruppen platform is reliable, presents an easier control system is faster to connect and remove, and most importantly, delivers higher quality audio.”
“This was the cleanest audio distribution system we’ve ever used for an NFL game weekend,” said Lindsay, who also cited positive feedback from the visiting NFL production team.
Though it was the second trip for the Bucs, whose owner, Malcolm Glazer, also owns Manchester United, the Bears dominated the first half and won 24-18.
