Each year, UAE National Day is celebrated  with a series of spectacular events. This year was no exception, with Abu Dhabi’s centrepiece being an hour-long event hosted in a custom-built, temporary stadium that featured the very latest in audio technology to reflect the event’s futuristic theme and included a mirrored pair of DiGiCo SD5s, supplied by Delta Sound.

Themed Here is the Future, the event’s programme showcased innovations such as artificial intelligence, space sciences and renewable energy, all of which are destined to enhance the living standards and happiness of the citizens and residents of the UAE. It was attended by the UAE Royal family and leaders, senior state officials, heads of government, representatives of the Armed Forces and Police, as well as local citizens. The accompanying, complex audio design, which also featured an L‑ISA immersive audio system, was conceived and delivered by leading Australian audio visual design company, Auditoria.

“Given the significance of the event, we adopted the typical dual-redundant control and signal distribution system that we have developed over multiple Olympic Games ceremonies projects,” explains Auditoria’s Scott Willsallen. “We used a mirrored pair of DiGiCo SD5 consoles for National Day, each feeding independent networks of SD-Racks and Optocore interfaces.”

Auditoria set up a primary network to deliver AES to the vast quantity of L-Acoustics amplified controllers used for the L‑ISA system, with a secondary network delivering analogue to the amps.

“My vision for the National Day’s audio was to create an immersive and convincing environment where the music and sound effects enveloped the audience, making them feel engaged and part of the performance, rather than passive observers,” says Scott. “The SD5 is a very powerful and flexible console and in the right hands, such as those of Justin Arthur who was manning the FOH position, it is ideal for this type of application.”

The event required over 200 music and sound effects stems from the replay systems into the console to provide the flexibility needed to create the mix and the 3D spatial planning for the L‑ISA system. The SD5 gave the Auditoria team the EQ, dynamics and bussing resources needed to deliver 80 outputs to the L‑ISA processor, which then delivered 40 outputs back to the console (one output for each loudspeaker array, plus a few mix-downs) for monitoring and delivery to the audio nodes around the site.

“The new L-Acoustics L-ISA platform was the key to spatially manipulating the sound in a creative and intuitive way,” concludes Scott. “The combination of DiGiCo and L-ISA was a pleasure for me and Justin to work with and, whilst both systems were setup in a dual-redundant configuration, the entire control system behaved perfectly and we had no need to switch to the backup.”

The SD5 is a very powerful and flexible console and in the right hands, such as those of Justin Arthur who was manning the FOH position, it is ideal for this type of application.