In February 2008 Sound By Design’s Dave Shepherd was enlisted to rock the 12,500 seat Budapest Sports Arena for the Forever Living Products (FLP) European Rally. This annual event in which Sound By Design has been involved for many years provides a pinnacle to the smaller monthly UK shows which tour the country. Despite being officially a corporate show, the brief reads more like a rock and roll rider. A “high impact, high fidelity” sound system that is even across the entire venue, is essential to keep the 12,000 person crowd energised, chanting and dancing all day for two days.

Dave recruited a band of five regular freelancers to support him with this prominent show. Consideration was placed to ensure specialist people were provided for key roles of front-of-house, playback and monitor engineer, as well as comms and radio microphone technicians.  The rally provides one of the more complex shows that Sound By Design supports. This year a mix of a 17 piece Hungarian band, 6 piece English band, presenters, dance acts, playback stings, video playback and a synchronised laser show was coordinated during the marathon two, eight hour shows. As an extra challenge, client Creative Realisation decided to place both bands on a 9 meter revolve. Dave was required to compact the bands requested physical space, and provide 64 signal lines from the platform and 28 returns lines for monitors of the 23 musicians. The cable route was achieved by flying 6m of truss from the centre of the rotation into backstage, at a height of 1.5m above the top of the revolve and suspending cable from it. This enabled the revolve to rotate the required 600 degrees without excess twist on the mass of cable while minimised the cable length for the passive speakers. 

A DiGiCo D5 was used to its limit at FOH with a Midas Venice 320 to sub-mix audio and video playback sends. The FOH Engineer also mixed a separate internet TV mix that was being broadcast live on ‘FLP TV’ and made use of one of Sound By Design’s new multi-track recording computers allowing post production of the show for DVD. 39 channels of fold-back on stage were split between a DiGiCo D5 and D1. The D5 took control of the two bands while the D1 mixed the monitors on the front line of the stage for presenters, dancers and lead singers. Dave designed the DiGiCo system so that each desk had a local rack connected via MADI while two 56 channel stage racks were connected globally via an Optocore loop.

To provide a cost effective solution, L-Acoustics speakers and racks were sourced locally.  36 boxes of V-DOSC and 8 boxes of dV-DOSC were flown in the main left right arrays, 24 SB28 subwoofers were spaced in a line under the stage and 6 ARCS were used for front-fill. 16 boxes of dV-DOSC were flown behind FOH as delays. The 115XT HiQ stage monitors and hard wired in-ear monitors were also supplied locally.

Sound By Design supplied 12 channels of their flagship radio microphone system, Shure UHF-R. The Shure wireless workbench software proved invaluable when configuring the system for European frequency bands and monitoring potential RF interference in the venue during the show. RTS comms were specified to provide a consistent high quality communications system with 3 rings installed and maintained with 23 wired and 8 wireless stations. This event also gave Sound By Design’s new Pelter Lite-Com noise reducing 2-way radios an outing. The hands-free headset radios were successfully used for rigging and prior to the main production comms system being operational. The main problem the sound crew had with the radios was lending them to video, lighting and set crews and them not letting us have them back!!!