Centrepiece of Expo 2020, Al Wasl Dome Permanently Showcase Immersive

Dubai, UAE - December 2022 When Expo 2020 opened in September 2021 after a year's delay due to the pandemic, it more than lived up to its pre-event billing. Recording more than 24 million visits during its six-month run, the site included 200 pavilions representing 191 participating countries. The Expo was bookended by lavish opening and closing ceremonies which took place in the spectacular Al Wasl Dome, purpose-built for the Expo City.

Al Wasl, which means connection' in Arabic, is the historic name for Dubai where the eponymously named dome became the focal point of the 438-hectare Expo campus. In fact, connection' was the central theme of the Expo, whose objective of Connecting Minds and Creating the Future' is manifest in the Dome, which served as the physical link between the three thematic districts of the Expo: Opportunity, Mobility and Sustainability. Its semi-open design also connects the indoors to the outdoors, encompassing both enclosed and open spaces. An extraordinary structure, the Dome boasts an internal volume of 724,000 cubic metres and houses the world's largest 360-degree projection theatre. Requiring an innovative audio system that was capable of immersing visitors in a diverse array of audio content, the Al Wasl management team turned to Auditoria Pty to design and Creative Technology Middle East (CT ME) to install L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology and DiGiCo mixing consoles for Expo 2020.

The technology of the Dome had to be at the forefront, says Andrew Nu, Business Development, System Integration, CT ME. Expo 2020 wanted this to be a fully flexible, functional system. Originally a background and foreground system, they soon realised that, with the dream of having incredible immersive content, they had to uplift the audio to match the video.

The sheer scale of the Dome is reflected in the quantities of L-Acoustics cabinets installed as part of the vast immersive system: a total of 432 Kiva II, arrayed in 27 hangs of 16 each, plus 24 KS28 subwoofers, all powered by 54 LA4X and 12 LA12X amplified controllers. This sits on an Optocore network, with control via DiGiCo consoles and 4REA4 mix engines, as a self-contained system that can be completely operated from the control room. Immersive audio control was provided by two L-ISA Processors. A central truss system includes six arrays of four A15 and two arrays of three A10, two Focus and a wide in each array, along with KS21 subs.

CT's systems integration division also managed to pull off the near-impossible trick of making the entire audio system almost invisible. Kiva II, colour-matched to the interior d cor, are nestled seamlessly into the dome's steelwork, allowing the arrays to mimic the structural lines. Nu comments, Everything becomes sort of invisible if you don't know where the speakers are, you don't spot them. The challenges of physically implementing the systems were met by teamwork on an heroic scale. The key factor was the brilliance of the team, Nu continues. Auditoria's Scott Willsallen and L-Acoustics came up with a scheme that worked Kiva II was chosen as a function of the geometry of the structure, and our ingenuity led us to install KS28 subs into pods that had access holes just a little bigger than the subs themselves.

Creative Technology and Auditoria began working on the sound design for the installation in early 2019 to meet the original October 2020 Expo opening date. When the Expo was postponed for a year, the teams took the opportunity to review designs and begin to work out show control for the day-to-day content management for the Expo.

Auditoria also engineered and operated audio for the impressive opening ceremony in October 2021, which was designed by Sebastian Hammond, where a global TV audience joined the 3,000-strong crowd inside the Dome for performances from Ellie Goulding, classical pianist Lang Lang and Andrea Bocelli. The March 2022 closing ceremony, also engineered and operated by Auditoria, featured concerts by Christina Aguilera, Norah Jones and Yo-Yo Ma. Willsallen notes that there were a thousand loudspeakers in use at the opening ceremony and all L-Acoustics!

During Expo itself the immersive experience was augmented with an overlay system provided by Agora. In terms of control, at the peak of it, we had a pair of DiGiCo Quantum 7s on FOH for the opening ceremony, a pair of DiGiCo Quantum 7s on monitors, and a pair of DiGiCo Quantum 7Bs on broadcast, Willsallen continues. A Quantum 7 dual engine was in the control room directing traffic, and three 4REA4 frames doing various other matrixing duties.

The key for any immersive environment is to ensure that any listener can clearly hear and identify all of the sound sources. We determined the position of the Kiva II arrays on the trellis by creating a listener zone both within the garden and within the whole site. Having listeners be able to hear every array means that if a sound source is moving across the stage, everyone can hear that same source moving across the sound space.

The Al Wasl Dome featured myriad original audio content each day throughout the six-month Expo. To support audio creators in their content development, Auditoria built two studios in Dubai, equipped with L-ISA Studio software for immersive sound mixing. For example, if Emirates were doing a five-minute themed item in the Dome, they would bring their audio files into the edit suite and our team would turn that into something suitable for a 27-channel immersive sound system, explains Willsallen. We had an Audio Production Manager, Ethan Curry, onsite for the whole 12 months, while Senior Editor Steve Logan looked after the studio and managing the L-ISA authoring for any content that went into the Plaza. Everything was done in L-ISA and once there was a workflow, we stuck

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