Most of ATK AudioTek's 46-person crew are veterans of the Super Bowl extravaganza. But they still take nothing for granted. Arriving three weeks before the Feb. 4 showdown between the Colts and the Bears at Miami's Pro Player Stadium, Scott Harmala, ATK's CTO and vice president of engineering, saw that this year's version was going to have a few unique challenges of its own. "We loaded six 48-foot tractor trailers full of gear — everything we thought we'd need and a little more — and we wound up using it all," he says. "It's the biggest system we've ever put together for this event."
That system is a JBL VerTec line array, with 90 VerTec 4889 boxes divided into 18 stacks loaded onto carts, to be wheeled out from parking spots along the sidelines to create a nearly perfect encirclement of the small but complex stage that halftime headliner Prince would use. Each stack was four or five enclosures high; in the case of five-box stacks, the top enclosure was hinged to fold over the fourth box so as not to impede the view from the sidelines when the carts were parked. Several of the carts for sideline positions also held a pair of EV 1152 enclosures to backfire sound into the field as far-field monitors.
The 40 JBL 4889A subs, placed midfield on either side of the field, hit unwary passersby like a freight train when they kicked in. Most shows of this type generally would call for 16 subs, and Harmala points out that since the system was field-mounted instead of flown, low frequencies would further benefit from the ground-coupling effect. But most shows don't have Prince, who is famous for not being either conventional or conservative. "He let us know what he wanted to achieve with this show," he says. "Hence the additional subs."
The P.A. used QSC Powerlite 4.0 amplifiers for highs and Powerlite 9.0 amps for lows. The monitors and the EV 1153 backfire cabinets were powered by Crown MacroTech 3600 amplifiers for lows and MacroTech 1200 amps for highs. Speaker management used a slew of XTA DP-224 and DP-424 controllers, with five DP-226s in a drive rack at the FOH position.
From the moment the first half of the game ended, ATK's crew would have little more than five minutes to pull the carts out and run audio lines to the jigsaw puzzle of a stage that was wheeled out in pieces from one end of the stadium. That brief shining moment is simply the tip of a complicated iceberg that ATK had to assemble and run.
From their compound near the broadcast park, ATK operated from six separate mixer locations, including the FOH entertainment position 25 rows up the north side of the stadium where Patrick Baltzell manned its Yamaha PM-5D console (a second PM-5D was brought in for use as FOH mixing of the stadium non-entertainment audio); the entertainment monitoring position with its Yamaha PM-1D board, manned by mixer Michael Parker and assisted by Tom Pesa, which shared a platform on field level with the RF/wireless hub and frequency coordinator James Stoffo; another two consoles located in the patching and cable center, under the grandstands where feeds from the Denali broadcast truck and on-air mixer Ed Greene and the other mixing positions were routed, using a Soundcraft SM-16; in that same location an Allen & Heath GL 4000 console was used to send the audio mix to Real Networks for streaming; a Yamaha 01V mixer was placed in the scoreboard position.
The FOH and monitor tasks were more easily combined since Prince's backing tracks came premixed, driven by SMPTE, one of three time code formats generated by the Denali truck to ATK's patching hub and then to FOH and monitoring. The tracks were stored on a Profile hard disk along with video effects.
While the P.A. system might have been the center of technical attention, the audio had many paths to travel, including distribution to press areas and to various parts of the stadium dubbed "press walks," where those covering the event would travel on the way to media rooms during halftime and at game's end, enabling them to continue to hear game play and referee calls without interruption.
But every show has its own issues. The major one here, says Harmala, was how to deal with the fact that a slew of temporary plywood enclosures for international press and other personnel, painted Miami Dolphins orange and perched along the top of the south side of the stadium like gaudy alpine ski chalets, had effectively placed large swaths of seats in the aural shadow of the distributed sound system.
The solution, after a mechanical analysis of the problem, was to position JBL 4887 boxes on the roofs of the buildout to downfire into the shadowed area, augmented by a 70- volt distributed system with six JBL Control 25 speakers placed under each buildout balcony, used as a shower system. Harmala called it a rough solution to an unexpected situation, and one that required not only virtually every last piece of equipment they brought, but coordination with the contractors building the temporary skyboxes. "And we had to come up with a solution that didn't blast out the people in the adjacent boxes," he says. "It was an issue of small fills, but it was in a sensitive spot, so it required a delicate balance."
Harmala showed me the schematics of the field system, along with the precise vertical and horizontal splay angles they had devised for the Dolphins' stadium, noting that placement of the speaker carts is also a delicate matter, constrained on one hand by the height of the field wall in front of the first row of seats and the rake angle of the seating, and on the other hand by the amount of real estate the field can give up to achieve an optimum throw angle. Pro Player Stadium has decently wide sidelines, Harmala says, which is not the case at other venues. However, not a stitch of the field at this Super Bowl was wasted, with the Florida A&M University marching band joining Prince for the finale. "You'd rather not compromise on this kind of thing, because of how many seats depend upon getting that angle and throw to work properly," he says.
At the same time, groundskeepers kept a watchful eye on what the carts can do to their grass. ATK had custom wheels made up for the cart that disperse their weight over a larger amount of space. Additionally, they placed two-foot by two-foot plywood boards under the wheels during rehearsals. The use of the VerTec P.A. also helped, reducing the total weight of the carts from the 1,700 pounds they reached when loaded with the self-amped V-DOSC cabinets they had been originally designed for.
Game day for Super Bowl XLI went from showery to relentlessly rainy. From above, the slender stage, built in the shape of the glyph that Prince had used as a surrogate for a name in the 1990s, looked more like a freeway interchange. Nonetheless, he and three vocalists negotiated it without a slip. Even Prince knocking over his vocal mic stand happened after his singing was done, making it more a dramatic anticlimax than a cause for concern.
Still, it took a lot of concentration. As Harmala put it after the fact, "The rain made a tough show that much tougher, and we had to put aside our personal comfort to make sure nothing got wet that wasn't supposed to." And while a glitch-free Super Bowl has always been everyone's goal, it's even more important since the all-time Super Bowl hiccup that was constantly referred to during rehearsals, that hard-luck story that no new mistake could ever match. Says Mike Stahl, "Remember the 'wardrobe malfunction?'"
