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Big Ben Chimes in the New Year with Soundweb London and Delta Sound

Working for event organisers Jack Morton Worldwide, Delta Sound Inc director Paul Keating designed a system in which a pair of the new-generation Soundweb London BLU-80 devices were used in conjunction with a free space optic, Infra-Red point-to-point bridge.

Four microphone sources were placed up in the Clock Tower of Big Ben, fed into the first BLU-80, which in turn were connected to the ‘sending’ FSO, IR unit. Meanwhile, the receiving IR unit was situated on the ground some 400 metres away, feeding the signal back into the second BLU-80. This allowed the audio to be distributed along the eight loudspeaker masts located down the Embankment between Westminster Bridge and Jubilee Bridge, enabling the estimated 80,000 crowd to hear the chimes clearly.

The BBC were so impressed with the link that they used it as their source for the live broadcast output as opposed to using the standard ISDN circuits from Broadcasting House.

Delta Inc’s Daren Hirst, who took responsibility for the Soundweb London programming (and interface protocols with the IR Link), remarked, “Using CobraNet allowed us to run high quality digital audio in real-time over a standard EtherNet network; it worked incredibly well — in fact it could be heard audibly across on the South Bank.

“The BLU-80’s were purchased specifically for this event, and they will now form a valuable part of our hire stock.”

In addition to offering greater I/O reconfigurability, BSS Soundweb London offers dual-redundant CobraNetTM audio networking, plus integration of control, monitoring and error reporting (in conjunction with Crown Audio CTs amplifiers fitted with TCP/IQ PIP cards) plus, of course, the overall control of the system via an EtherNet topology.

In picture: the IR set up from the Clock Tower.

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Big Ben Chimes in the New Year with Soundweb London and Delta Sound

7th January 2005

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