K-Pop celebrates with Nexo in Seoul
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2018 saw K-POP take the USA by storm, as boyband BTS filled baseball stadia in Los Angeles and New York, as well as European capitals, with their loyal fanbase known as the Army.
Every January, this musical genre holds its own awards ceremony; the Golden Disk Awards event featured performances by many of its big names: BTS, EXO, Twice, Red Velvet, Black Pink, Momoland and Mamamoo, among others. The domed baseball stadium houses 25,000 K-Pop fans, and the show is broadcast live by JTBC.
The Sky Dome is one of Korea’s largest indoor venues, and the largest-capacity stadium. Designed to evoke the shape and movement dynamic of a baseball, the structure presents huge acoustic challenges for sound reinforcement. However, local production rental house Way Audio has serviced many large concert events at Gocheok, with Yun Cheol Lee tailoring his system designs to perform perfectly in the huge stadium.
“The reverberation time and reflections created inside the venue, with its high roof, cause a lot of problems for visiting audio rental companies,” explains James Lee, MD of AWorks, distributor of Nexo sound reinforcement equipment in South Korea. “Do Gil Kim and Joon Ho Kang are also key members of a Way Audio team that has more experience than anyone else of how to design efficiently, using Nexos modelling and prediction software tools, to get a pleasing result in this location.”
Nexo’s modular line array is a key component of Way Audio’s success, running over a Dante network and highly controllable thanks to the NeMo software suite. Set up with a main PA comprising 15 sets of M46 main and B112 bass modules, with M28 down-fills, the system also used the smaller M28 cabinets as 4-point delays, and as front-fills. All stage monitoring was provided by Nexo PS15 cabinets.
All channel signals were mixed at FOH by Joon Ho Kang, Way Audio’s general manager, before being sent to the OB van for JTBC’s live broadcast. “The STM system is very versatile and multi-purpose,” confirmed James Lee, “it is ideal for rock ‘n’ roll as well as K-pop, and Way Audio is always busy with it, getting many enquiries from the K-Pop world as well as other entertainment companies.”
(Jim Evans)
