The final of Sing China’s inaugural season held at the Beijing National Stadium, commonly known as the Birds Nest, was powered by an audio system totalling 218 L-Acoustics loudspeakers.

Rightway Audio Consultants designed the system for the show, which attracted a live audience of over 60,000 and was broadcast by Zhejiang Television.

Sing China was hosted by superstar Li Hua shao, with renowned artists Jay Chou, Na Ying, Wang Feng and Harlem Yu as coaches and sought to find new vocal talent drawn from public auditions, taking the chosen acts through a series of rounds before announcing Jiang Dunhao of Team Wang Feng the winner.

“We supplied all audio requirements for the two Playoff rounds and the final, which were all mixed by Front of House engineer Mr. Jin Shaogang,” explained Vincent Zhou, system designer for L-Acoustics’s Chinese distributor, Rightway Audio. “We have worked with the show’s production team for many years, supplying L-Acoustics for other series and so the show’s audio director, Mr. Jin Shaogang was familiar with L-Acoustics and trusted the system. We were both confident that K1’s power and clarity would provide the right solution for Sing China.”

The final design comprised 12 K1 plus two K2 left and right for the main hangs, which cover the field, with the top K1 covering a distance of 125m. Two side hangs of 10 K1 plus three K2 were positioned to cover levels 1 and 2 to the side of the stage. Having worked at the Birds Nest before, Vincent Zhou and the Rightway team were familiar with the venue’s challenging reverb, as well as the obstacle posed by two permanently installed LED screens on the right-hand side of Level 3.

Working in conjunction with Mr. Shaogang and L-Acoustics’ applications engineer Alvin Koh, Zhou used Soundvision to design a system that deployed delays to ensure even coverage of the venue, including an asymmetrical flown delay system to account for the LED screens and provide even cover for Levels 2 and 3. This approach meant that Shaogang did not have to drive the system too hard, keeping the volume at a level that accounted for the reverb while ensuring good intelligibility throughout.

“We had nine hangs using a total of 48 K1, 18 K2 and 22 K1-SB cabinets, with four of them at stage left and five stage right to prevent energy going to the screens,” Zhou explained. “We had 16 SB28s each side configured in cardioid. When you have a long horizontal array, you get narrow coverage in the horizontal, so we had stacks of just two cabinets to make them lower than the stage. In the horizontal, we had eights stacks of subs. This meant that the horizontal coverage was a little narrow, so we added some delays at the outside of the subs.

“Alvin gave me a lot of suggestions that were really helpful and, because Soundvision is such a powerful tool, I was able to produce a model that was very close to the Birds Nest’s model,” he continued. “The results were perfect and the entire team was very happy.”

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