Delta sound helps Microsoft celebrate in style

22 October 2003

France - Delta Sound recently provided all sound reinforcement for the prestigious Microsoft Xbox X03 games festival in the South of France, attended by some 400 guests, among them members of the international games press, developers, publishers and programmers.

Microsoft is a long-term client of Delta, and this was the third year running that the London-based PA company has worked on one of the annual Xbox events. It followed the unveiling of the first console, the X01, at Pierre Cardin's 'bubble' villa, also in the South of France, and a second event on a lake in Seville last year. This year saw a return to the Côte d'Azur and the exclusive resort of Juan Les Pins, where the festival was held at the newly opened Les Pecheurs beach club followed by an all-day conference at the town's Palais des Congrès.

The proceedings kicked off with presentations by Microsoft dignitaries from three podiums on the beach, following an appearance by the corporate vice-president of games publishing, Ed Fries, who introduced the new line-up of games. To relay the presentations across the beach and club, Delta suspended three arrays of eight L-Acoustics dV-Dosc and two ground-stacked SB218 subwoofers, while 12m masts at each of the presentation positions provided rigging for the system. There were also 45 x 3m cubes that were located around the club and beach housing a viewing monitor and an EV S80 loudspeaker. These pods were used as general fill-in positions providing additional coverage and helping refer the audience to the various presentation areas.

A Yamaha DM2000 desk controlled a network of four BSS Soundwebs via a MIDI-to-serial interface handling all level, mute and EQ, and refering each dV-Dosc array and a number of the pods to each presentation area. Delta also used two Tascam MX2424 hard disk recorders slaved to video for the playback of the opening and closing sequences.

After the one-hour presentation a shutter came up to reveal 50 X03 consoles inside the beach club, with an additional 45 games stations, or 'pods', situated around the beach. From a d&b DJ rig supplied by Delta Sound, Massive Attack's Daddy-G provided the music while experts put over 100 new games through their paces. Day two was a more formal presentation at the Palais Des Congrès. Here Delta chose a more compact d&b audio system of E9 and E18 speakers to provide sound reinforcement, with a Shure radio mic system and a Soundcraft mixing console. A 60-user trunked ShowNet system was used to handle all site communications and provided a link between both venues.

(Sarah Rushton-Read)