This year's theme was Chansons d'Amour with a prelude courtesy of Les Choeurs de France (the choirs of France), an ensemble of 700 choristers whose music also accompanied the pyrotechnic display. Production was handled by Annecy Evenements who turned to Austrian pyrotechnician, Armin Lukasser for the second year running to create the fireworks spectacular. Also for the second year running, audio was handled by Starlight Evenementiel a full service production company from Alsace.
Starlight worked in conjunction with German rental company, Omega, and between them they fielded a powerful 130-box EAW KF730 compact line array system. Amplification was handled by Crown IT6000 power amplifiers with system processing courtesy of Lake Contour.
It was a huge event in every sense of the word, and the technical statistics make impressive reading; there were 50 people on site just to handle production (audio and fireworks), but with the addition of security, first aid, ticketing and other essential services, there were over 1000 personnel involved. The fireworks were detonated from 35 pontoons spaced at intervals in the lake across a façade of 600m. The display lasted a full hour and a half, during which time 600,000-worth of the world's most sophisticated fireworks went up in smoke.
From an audio perspective, Starlight constructed eleven pontoons across a frontage of 1.5km, each pontoon housing a stack of six KF730 cabinets atop four EAW LA400 subs, making a total of 72 KF730s and 48 LA400s. The whole system was connected via Ethernet with all the cabling running underwater.
The advantage of using Ethernet, as Starlight's managing director, Philippe Dietsch points out, was no loss of signal and no delay whatsoever across the entire 1.5km distance. A further bonus of the Ethernet connection was that it allowed for independent control of each loudspeaker stack. "The advent of Ethernet has made our lives so much easier," commented Dietsch. "To eliminate all delay across such a great distance is a real achievement."
(Jim Evans)
