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EAW Goes Off with a Bang at Lake Annecy

The biggest fireworks display in Europe was held on the first Saturday in August, as it is every year, at the Fete du Lac in Annecy. Set against the stunning backdrop of the French Alps, it is a truly spectacular event that attracts tens of thousand of visitors every year. Over 57,000 places were sold in advance with a further 200,000 spectators lining the shores of the lake wherever they could find a suitable vantage point.

This year's theme was 'Chansons d'Amour' with a prelude courtesy of 'Les Choeurs de France' (the choirs of France), an ensemble of 700 choristers from all over France, whose music also accompanied the pyrotechnic display. Production was handled by Annecy Evenements who turned to Austrian pyrotechnician, Armin Lukasser for the second year running to create the fireworks spectacular. Also for the second year running, audio was handled by Starlight Evenementiel, a full service production company from Alsace. Starlight worked in conjunction with German rental company, Omega, and between them they fielded a powerful 130-box EAW KF730 compact line array system. Amplification was handled by Crown IT6000 power amplifiers with system processing courtesy of Lake Contour.

It was a huge event in every sense of the word, and the technical statistics make impressive reading; there were 50 people on site just to handle production (audio and fireworks), but with the addition of security, first aid, ticketing and other essential services, there were over 1000 personnel involved. The fireworks were detonated from 35 pontoons spaced at intervals in the lake across a façade of 600m. The display lasted a full hour-and-a-half, during which time 600,000€-worth of the world's most sophisticated fireworks went up in smoke.

From an audio perspective, Starlight constructed eleven pontoons across a frontage of 1.5km, each pontoon housing a stack of six KF730 cabinets atop four EAW LA400 subs, making a total of 72 KF730s and 48 LA400s. The whole system was connected via Ethernet with all the cabling running underwater. The advantage of using Ethernet, as Starlight's managing director, Philippe Dietsch was quick to point out, was no loss of signal and no delay whatsoever across the entire 1.5km distance. A further bonus of the Ethernet connection was that it allowed for independent control of each loudspeakerspeaker stack. "The advent of Ethernet has made our lives so much easier," commented Dietsch. "To eliminate all delay across such a great distance is a real achievement."

Dietch also waxed lyrical about the performance of the KF730 system. "I love it," he pronounced. "It's small, compact, incredibly easy to set up, yet enormously powerful, which is a must in an outdoor situation like this. Having experienced problems in the past where people complained that either the music was completely drowned out by the fireworks, or adversely affected by the wind, Annecy now employs an independent acoustic consultant to test the system and make sure we have enough SPL. We needed to achieve a minimum of 105dB at the very back of the stands, so each stack was tested and measured individually. We measured the furthest point at 120m away from the stack, yet we were still able to achieve the minimum requirement with ease. Even the wind had little or no effect on the sound. We had smooth, even coverage right to the back of the stands. And because the system is so compact, the visual intrusion was minimal."

Dietsch concluded: "In my opinion, the KF730 line array from EAW is definitely the most ergonomic system on the market today. It's also one of the most versatile – one person can install it if necessary, and it sounds as good groundstacked as it does flown. Furthermore, it packs into virtually no space at all. This was definitely one of the best investments I ever made!

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EAW Goes Off with a Bang at Lake Annecy

1st September 2005

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