“Willkommen 2024,” recently held to celebrate New Year’s Eve in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and broadcast live for several hours by ZDF Television in featuring live performances from leading German artists, was supported by sound reinforcement systems utilizing a range of CODA Audio loudspeakers deployed by production specialist AMBION GmbH to serve an estimated 65,000 spectators.
While the sound systems were required to cover a very large area, they also had to take account of the sigh-lines of many TV cameras and be as discreet as possible. Florian Vollmer, senior specialist planning and head of sound technology at AMBION, explains, “It’s true that the specifications were quite demanding! We had to cover the entire area from the Brandenburg Gate to the Victory Column, all with a limit of 84 dB. In total, this was a distance of almost 2.5 kilometers, which required uninterrupted sound at the desired level.”
Florian began planning for the show three weeks before construction began, creating a Vectorworks plan to be used to generate a detailed CODA Audio System Optimiser file, before checking the various band riders and liaising with other contractors to see what infrastructure could be shared: “CODA’s System Optimiser played a central role in the system configuration,” he says. “We used it to calculate an extremely realistic result in advance so we could clearly see what was needed at which position.”
Based on his calculations, the setup deployed almost 300 loudspeakers from across the CODA Audio range. Main L/R arrays were comprised 14 AiRAY full-range modules joined by three SC2-F subwoofers per side, plus a center L/R of eight N-RAY per hang. Two hangs of 12 x N-RAY provided the out fill, with nine APS loudspeakers for nearfield. A sub-arc of 36 SCP-F completed the main PA.
A further inventory of AiRAY, ViRAY and N-RAY was used for delays. Loudspeakers were driven by a total of 46 CODA Audio LINUS14D and 24 LINUS10 DSP amplifiers.
“It was important that loudspeakers were ‘invisible’ but that everyone could hear everything perfectly everywhere!” Florian concludes. “We were able to rely on the super-compact dimensions of the CODA units to achieve our aims, particularly center-stage where we opted for a left/right slope instead of a cluster hanging in the middle of the set. We kept the nearfield to a minimum and concealed the subs underneath the stage deck.”
