The 23rd World Youth Day was a Catholic youth festival that started on 15 July and continued until 20 July 2008 in Sydney, Australia. About 500,000 young people from 200 countries attended during the week, and more than 1,000,000 came for the weekend. They were joined by about 600 bishops and cardinals, as well as by 6,600 reporters.
Auditoria was engaged by the organisers to work with their senior producers to design and deliver the technical aspects of all major venues involved in the event. This included Randwick Racecourse, Barangaroo, St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney Opera House Forecourt, The Domain, Centennial Park, Hyde Park and Cockle Bay. Our technical scope included the audio, video, city-wide production comms, signal transport, simultaneous translation and video surveillance systems for crowd control and show management.
Randwick Racecourse was the main venue and the largest with a total capacity of 350,000. The audio system consisted of 460 loudspeakers distributed over 69 delay towers to provide complete coverage of the site. The system consisted of Adamson Y-18, Meyer Sound Milo, L-Acoustics VDOSC, L-Acoustics KUDO, EAW KF750 and d&b Q-Series.
Signal was distributed on a temporary fibre-based Ethernet network running DANTE to Dolby Lake Processors. It was the largest deployment of DolbyLake Processors ever at the time and uncovered some interesting problems with network capacity that were overcome.
Barangaroo was the next largest venue with a capacity of approximately 150,000 and was used for the majority of the Papal events. The audio system consisted of 30 loudspeaker towers with 200 loudspeakers in total from a combination of Adamson and Nexo.
Our team consisted of the following:
Scott Willsallen - Audio Director and Project Director.
Ian Anderson - Video and radio comms systems designer.
Nick Eltis - production comms systems designer.
Shannon Gobell - Project Manager.
Ian Cooper - lead audio systems engineer.
Nick Macfie - Production Manager.
Paul Walton - Production Manager.
Jason Owen - Simtrans and wireless linking specialist.
Steve Pippett - Assisted Ian in the design of video systems.