Presented at the Berlin Exhibition Centre on 4 March, the event included live performances by international artists including Rihanna, Robbie Williams, Depeche Mode, Sade, Ke$ha and The Gossip. Broadcast by German TV station ARD, the event attracted a huge audience from across Europe.
To keep the show running smoothly, two audio crews were employed, each comprising a front of house and monitor engineer, stage managers, stage and wireless techs. One team took care of all live music and playback, the other looking after all the presenters, guests and speakers.
Music and speech were mixed at FOH by a pair of PM5Ds, with the monitor position equipped with a PM1D and PM5D-RH.
All inputs were split on stage and sent directly to the monitor consoles, manned by Karim Humbatsch (speech) and Wayne 'Heights' Gittens (live music). Here the PM1D served as the master, the 24 mix sends from the PM5D-RH being routed to the PM1D via AES/EBU, therefore allowing the 32 outputs of the PM1D to be accessed from both consoles. Both consoles therefore had access to all wedge and in-ear audio paths.
With the FOH consoles almost 200m away, the decision was taken to use a circular, 48kHz Optocore fibre optic link, which carried around 96 inputs and 48 returns. Six Yamaha AD8HR mic preamps were provided on stage for this purpose, the signals fed into the Optocore system via AES/EBU.
Individual direct access to the remote head amps was possible with the aid of the FOH desks, the relevant Yamaha protocol being supported by Optocore. All four desks therefore had their own head amp with a corresponding recallable gain control for every channel.
As with the monitors, the two PM5Ds at the FOH position handled the live music and speech elements separately, the former manned by Bernd Buthe and the latter by Olli Voges, with support from system engineer Thomas Mundorf.
Individual scenes for each artist were programmed into Buthe's PM5D, however the most important criteria for Voges' desk was rapid access.
"Anything can happen when people are speaking from the stage," he says. "During the last 12 years I have been working on this show, we've had everything from speeches performed by people with the microphone virtually in their mouths to those speaking three metres away from it. Once a speaker used the microphone as a support and we have had incidents where it has been torn from the stand during a live transmission.
"Because of this, it is impractical to programme individual scenes for every speaker, because we never know what's going to happen. Direct access is always the main priority, because I have to mix the speech part of the show on the fly. In addition, the sequence of events can also change, especially during a live show."
To achieve this, all the most important presenter and speaker/guest microphones, as well as playback feeds, were located directly accessible on the top PM5D layer. In addition to these inputs, interpreters and commentators also had to be catered for.
"We primarily worked with the aid of sub-groups, each of which was pre-equalised for a different microphone type. In this way it was possible to react quickly to microphone changes: a headset X could thus be transformed into a hand-held Y in a matter of seconds by changing the group routing," Verges continues.
All groups were consolidated into matrix outputs. The speech and music mixes from both FOH PM5Ds were consolidated via AES/ EBU and transmitted to the PA system controller as eight output paths, comprising a stereo matrix for music; a complete stereo sum with music and voi
