Mike Smeaton, system tech at the Morelia soccer stadium event, adds, “The Dante fiber network let you carry signal over really long distances, you can’t run copper cable for more than 300 feet. We had long runs from FOH to either side of the stage and especially to the parking lots. There would be too much loss over conventional cables.
“The most challenging thing was the ability to adapt when things changed at the last minute with several layers of authority from the Mexican government to our client and down to us. Reacting quickly and effectively to the challenges and making sure the audio was clean and clear and we had good backup in case anything went wrong.
“The rest was reasonably straight-ahead because of the fiber, just making sure everyone in the house understood what the Pope was saying and that the orchestra and another stage with local musicians sounded good throughout the venue.”
The soccer stadium loudspeaker setup consisted of J12s and J8s in two main hangs with 14 enclosures each, two outer arrays with six J12s each, two rear arrays per side of two J12 cabinets, two in fill arrays with six Q1s and six J-Sub enclosures per side.
Three ground stacks of four J12s each were used for delays, with 20 d&b M4 wedges for monitors and 44 D80 amplifiers driving the system.
The last Pope appearance was in Juarez, Mexico in “a park that was pretty much a dirt parking lot about 1,600 feet long by 900 feet wide with a small soccer stadium at the end right along the U.S./Mexican border,” as described by 3G system tech Jon Daly.
The loudspeaker quotient included 16 J8s for left and right main hangs; four Q1s for out fills and six Q1s for in fills, 16 J and INFRA subs and M4s for monitors. The first delay row consisted of three towers with eight J8s and J12s total, delays row two, three, and four with three towers each with six J8s and J12s total, and a delay row five with each tower including six V12s.
The soccer stadium system had eight arrays; each with 10 V8s and 16 J-Subs, all powered by 75 D80 amplifiers.
“Because the event was the last to be organized by the Mexican government and was almost canceled, we didn’t have much time,” Daly adds. “It was a real challenge to get the cable and equipment installed with only a few days to prepare. We had all of this fiber and none of it could run above ground. It all had to be buried in a network of corrugated plastic tubes between FOH, the stage towers, 15 delay towers, and eight speaker clusters hanging from a four post roof in the center of the soccer stadium next to the video screen.
“Luckily, the massive Dante network consisting of over 10,000 meters of fiber connecting everything together allowed us to take optimized signal a lot further––up to 1,200 meters into the soccer stadium––while also maintaining absolute signal integrity. We also had an amp network control on the same network for the D80s.”