This year, the second week of June found Rotterdam hosting 700,000 spectators for the second of eight races in the newly created World Series. The huge crowd of air show fans turned out on racing Sunday to watch planes fly under the Erasmus Bridge at speeds exceeding 400 km per hour and hear the race called, over pounding "house" beats, through a huge system of over 200 Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers supplied by Dutch Generations Light & Sound (Generations L&S).
Generations L&S is a company specializing in production for spectacular large-scale events. Investing in a large line array system therefore seemed only a matter of time, and the MILO high-power curvilinear array system was a natural decision. "We don't buy a system this size every day to put it mildly, so we looked into all options available," says Generations L&S CEO Gaby van Amerongen. "MILO, however, came out quickly as the best choice for us."
The system, which was deployed along the 2.6km banks of one of the world's largest harbors, incorporated 60 MILO high-power curvilinear loudspeakers, 12 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers, 28 MSL-4 horn-loaded long-throw loudspeakers, 28 UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers, 42 650-P high-power subwoofers, six M3D-Sub directional subwoofers, four CQ-1 wide coverage main loudspeakers, two CQ-2 narrow coverage main loudspeakers, 12 legacy, conventionally-powered MSL-3 reinforcement loudspeakers, and four LD-3 compensating line drivers.
The scale of the event made it challenging for Generations L&S to provide intelligibility for the announcing, and clarity for the music, especially given that the original attendance predictions were for 250,000 - 300,000. "At some points we had to shoot over 100m of water before even reaching the start of the audience," notes Sander Koers, Generations' operational manager. "The designs we did in Meyer Sound's MAPP Online acoustical prediction program gave us some peace of mind and did, indeed, turn out to be accurate. Still, it was quite an experience to find such high intelligibility and a sense of power over hundreds and hundreds of meters."
The sound system design for the event was both immense and complex, to say the least. The Erasmus Bridge area was served by two arrays of 12 MILO cabinets each and seven 700-HP subwoofers, which carried for up to 400m. A large square nearby was handled by two arrays of eight MILO cabinets each hung in scaffolding, with five 700-HP units delivering the low end.
(Lee Baldock)
