34 l August 2013 livereport GERMANY A clear round
Phil Wardvisits Aachen’s historic international horse trials to find Electro-Voice really getting the Gigabit between its teeth
THE CAMPUS may remind you of Wimbledon, with scores of ménages spread over several acres but, in scale and status, the World Equestrian Festival in Aachen rivals soccer’s FIFA World Cup. Arriving from 30 different countries with 535 horses in tow, 375 riders compete over 10 days in jumping, dressage, eventing, driving and vaulting for such bounties as the Rolex Grand Prix, the Mercedes-Benz Nations’ Cup and the Deutsche Bank Prize – with €2.67 million in prize money and trophies up for grabs and a complete technical budget of €12 million. So it’s a major broadcast
event, of course, but with 375,000 visitors there’s a serious sound reinforcement and voice evacuation challenge to saddle up for as well. According to organisers, enough cable to fill three large sea freight containers has to be laid to service the
arenas, the ‘CHIO Village’ of catering, accommodation and exhibitions – products on show range from fashion to Mercedes- Benz cars – and probably the stables too. You can’t imagine horses of this stature going without cable TV, can you? A share of the €12 million
budget for the event goes to the main technical contractor – E Media Design (EMD), based in Oldenburg – but this is where extravagant claims about cabling can be countered in the light of a very significant breakthrough. EMD’s partner in terms of evacuation equipment is Hamburg’s Amptown System Company (ASC), while the pro-audio equipment provider for EMD is Gotaque Licht & Ton, from Bremen. For the last five years it’s been a showcase for Electro-Voice and Dynacord, the Straubing Sisters, and especially a platform for the application of E-V’s distributed,
networked PA/VA as this critical corner of the Bosch portfolio has evolved in line with IT and IP infrastructure. This year represents a home-soil debut for OMNEO, a “media networking architecture” that uses standard Ethernet hardware. Up to 10,000
XLC line arrays with Xi-2123 speakers downfills are used in the three main stadiums
devices can sit on the network, sharing synchronised, multichannel audio using Audinate’s Dante protocol and control systems managed by Open Control Architecture (OCA), a membership-based public standard for media network monitoring. “We had remote control of our amplifiers before, but now the NetMax N8000 digital matrix controller can do it all via one single cable,” explains Fredi Palm, Bosch Communication System’s key
18,000kg
www.psneurope.com
Of oats the participants get through during the event
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