A team of engineers from audio specialist tube uk worked through freezing temperatures, icy winds and snow to deliver sound systems for the two key areas of Bradford’s spectacular UK City of Culture opening event, staged in City Park, on January 10 and 11. Technology from d&B, QLab, Sennheiser and Riedel were at the heart of the set-up.
The RISE open-air spectacular inspired by the people and places of Bradford was created by award-winning director Kirsty Housley and featured a 200-strong cast, including professional performers and the people of Bradford. There were aerialists, projections, music from a huge community choir and orchestra, and breathtaking magic from Bradford-born magician Steven Frayne (formerly known as Dynamo).
tube uk faced many challenges. On site, the opening event ‘vista’ spanned several hundred metres and included LED screens and two 15m-high special scaffolding structures on which aerialists performed and across which large scale projections were beamed. A large community choir was positioned on the steps of the Magistrates Court, poets performed in the midst of the audience, as well as on the roof of Bradford’s 19th century town hall.
Behind this main area to the right was the One City building, a 5-storey glass windowed office block. On the third level, Airedale Symphony Orchestra performed, and all their sounds were fed into the main PA and their images to the LED screens.
tube’s mission was to design a PA system to cover the whole area with great sounding audio, which was achieved using five ground stacks of d&b V-Series, all sitting on PA risers, each with 6 x d&b V8 tops, 2 x V-SUBS and one KSL sub. These stacks were positioned to work together as a unified system and also separately, so different areas along vista sightlines could also be localised sonically. This was powered by d&b D80 amps.
While the input side was relatively straightforward; outputs were a lot more complex. A major challenge was managing the numerous feeds that the different performers – poets, rappers, orchestra, aerialists, DJ, community performers etc – needed at various times, resulting in 63 outputs running concurrently, distributed site-wide via a Dante network utilising multi-fibre and Cat 5 multicore systems. The Dante and control networks were distributed to 6 node points extending over 350m of infrastructure cabling.
To the left of the main show vista in Centenary Gardens was a large entry and concession area which was also central to the event. The audio requirement here was for a background style sound system to relay the show and this was achieved via 9 x carefully chosen PA positions around the food trucks, created using a combination of 12 x Y7P point source speakers with different combinations of Y and V-SUBS, all powered by 4 x D20 amps.
All the show’s audio sources were controlled via QLab running off two Mac Studio machines for full redundancy, with d&b R1 system control.
Monitoring included a pair of d&b Y10s for the choir and six M4 speakers for the two aerial performance towers, four d&b E8s for the orchestra, and 2 x M6s for the DJ. tube also supplied the DJ kit in the form of a Pioneer DJ900 NXS2 mixer and CDJ3000 decks. Press feeds were sent to 7 different locations, and additional feeds were provided for captioning and BSL signers.
Along with monitoring, talkback was a major element of this event, and tube was also asked to deliver site-wide show comms as a separate tender to the PA. They proposed a Green-Go / Riedel Bolero combination integrating both wired and wireless comms, the mix was necessary due to the amount of movement between the different areas.
The Green-Go was used for the fixed comms stations and Bolero for the mobile ones, amounting to 20 ways of Green-Go and 24 of Bolero, a total of 44 people on comms to run the shows, which was a challenge in itself.
Most of the comms action was also outdoors, but the system also included indoors comms for the orchestra, DJ and musicians in the One City building, all of which needed to transmit between the two protocols making the task infinitely more intricate.
tube uk’s work was system designed, and project managed by Melvyn Coote. He said: “The results were also a great tribute to the commitment and determination of all our crew who made it happen in the harshest and toughest environmental conditions.”
He added: “We definitely pushed the envelope in the comms universe.”
The RF systems included 12 ways of Sennheiser 5000 series belt packs and hand-helds and 12 ways of Sennheiser 2000 IEMs running off 6 monitor feeds. The FM transmission for community participants and general foldback consumed another 50 belt packs, and there were also four wired IEM feeds.
Coote concluded: “I can’t say enough great things about the teamwork from all departments. Especially in the terrible weather … this was not a gig for the fainthearted and it proved to be a truly collaborative and galvanising experience for all of us, one that brought amazing results.”
