Audinate joins Diamond Jubilee celebrations

To mark Queen Elizabeth’s 60 year reign on the throne, millions turned out in London last month to celebrate this historic milestone, with Audinate’s Dante technology chosen as the digital media network backbone for all the live sound events and festivities.

Audio production house Britannia Row Productions was responsible for all live sound across the celebrations. Joshua Lloyd, system designer who designed the sound system for the invited audience around the temporary stage built on the Queen Victoria Monument, said: “It was necessary to create a large distributed system to achieve this goal. We used 25 stacks of Outline Butterfly loudspeakers, for a total of 96 boxes, to create this complex system. Each stack of Butterfly’s was driven by a Lake LM series processor, and all were networked together using off-the-shelf Cisco switches over a standard IP network.”

The large sound system consisted of 100s of cabinets and over 6.5km of fibre optic cabling, with a system of such a size demanding a large matrix solution. Two Yamaha DME 64N units equipped with Dante-MY16-AUD networking cards were deployed, and in turn were connected to six XTA Dante Breakout boxes, as well as the 48 LM series processors.

Lloyd concluded: “This system could not have worked on analogue, as the distances involved were so great, and the interference from every kind of signal and power cabling would have seriously damaged the audio quality. Single mode fibre optic cabling was the only viable solution, and the sheer number of nodes required meant that using Dante Audio over IP was the simplest, most cost effective way to achieve this.”

Lee Ellison, Audinate’s CEO, concluded: “Everyone at Audinate is very proud to have been involved as a part of this moment in Great Britain’s history. As far as I know, the event was one of the largest crowds of people to every hear audio over a Dante digital media network.”

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