Thread August 11, 2012 editorial: comments

Dear Fellow Audiofanziners!

The dog days of summer is typically a dead time in our music gear universe, what with everyone on vacation and the heat, there is little to report.  But!  This year we are treated to a special event the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.   Even if you are not a live sound geek, you can’t help but be slightly curious as to how is sound reinforced in Olympic Stadium for the mother of all events with an estimated over 1 billion people around the world tuning in?  I myself counted around 22 line arrays, the V-DOSC system, featuring Wavefront Sculpture Technology, was designed by Paris-based L-Acoustics. 

For the opening ceremony that lasted over 3.5 hours long, 7,500 participants volunteered, 12,956 props were used, with over 500 speakers to support a million watt PA system!  To read more about the speaker design you can check out this Olympics forum thread on forum.speakerplans.com .

To know more about this amazing feat of engineering you can see some great photos/videos in this thread about Olympic Stadium. 

But what I really want to know is how did all this gear survive the weeks and weeks of constant rainfall prior to the opening ceremony?

Chater-La