At the end of September 2018, Pope Francis kicked off his four day Baltic tour, with a Holy Mass in Sàntakos Park in Kaunas, Lithuania. The event attracted over 100,000 to the park where local rental company, NGR Service, provided an extensive sound system, deploying two DiGiCo SD12s for the live mix, and broadcast and press feeds.
“NGR was chosen for this important event because of the quality of its equipment, of which DiGiCo is an important part, and its exemplary service,” said Ramūnas Alenskas from DiGiCo’s Lithuanian distributor Sonus: “They used the two DiGiCo SD12s along with two SD-Racks, a D2-Rack and an SD-Mini Rack, which were deployed for their sound quality and their ability to connect to all six racks in fully redundant mode.”
NGR owner Valdemaras Karpuška was Sound Director for the event, with Tomas Ždanovičius manning the FOH position and producing all the sound system designs.
“For the show, we had two stages – the main stage was just used for speeches, so the SD-Mini Rack was employed for the connection of 16 microphones,” explained Karpuška: “For the orchestra, chorus stage, we had a total of 54 inputs for main program, which comprised 86 musicians and more than 300 singers plus two soloists and 60 outputs provided for OB truck to mix the live broadcast. In addition, we had an extra 20 channels in the input list for the band that was playing from 5am to 10am as a warm up performance before the Pope came to the park. In total we had 92 input channels for the Pope visit show.”
The DiGiCo system included a DMI-MADI-B and DMI-MADI-C card installed in each of DiGiCo SD12s. On the main stage, the DiGiCo SD12 DMI-1 was connected to the SD-Mini Rack’s main connection. This was mirrored to the second SD12’s DMI-1 to the SD-Mini Rack’s Aux which allowed for full audio and control link on both DiGiCo SD12s for the main stage.
“It was extremely helpful to be able to distribute the stage racks in a few locations, and the easy set-up, fast programming, and user-friendly interface of the SD12s really was the key to successful preparation for such a huge project,” Alenskas concluded. “But, bearing in mind the importance of the event, being able to have a fully redundant system, where we could mirror the two consoles and stage racks, played a key role in us choosing DiGiCo for this event.”