Custom-built carts carry music speakers for Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, opening festivitiesSuper Bowl LX may or may not be the loudest NFL championship game ever, but it will definitely be lo m s en espa ol. The halftime performance - which has lately drawn more viewers than the game itself - this year will star multiple-Grammy Award-winner Bad Bunny, who sings almost exclusively in Spanish. A combination of his global popularity and ongoing controversy around immigration have led to expectations that this halftime show - officially, the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, a continuation of the partnership of the NFL, Apple Music, and Jay-Z's Roc Nation - will draw more viewers than even the 133.5 million who made last year's Kendrick Lamar show the most-watched of all time.
Venue Design Dictates Approach to Sound
A sound system to ensure that the fans in the venue fully experience the halftime show has been rolled out - literally. For the five previous Super Bowls, the halftime-performance sound systems were hoisted to the rafters of roofed stadiums - flown, in industry parlance. For this year's edition, though, the dedicated music PA system will be on bespoke wheeled carts for the first time since Super Bowl LV at Tampa's Raymond James Stadium.
ATK Audiotek/Clair Global Integration's Kirk Powell: We've done this many times, but, every time, it's also just like new. It's a tried-and-true method for quickly bringing a massive sound system on and then off the field in the 25-30 minutes allotted for a Super Bowl halftime - about twice that of a regular-season interval. The carts have been used in dozens of preceding championship games played in open-air stadiums, which, unlike the covered venues, do not offer the rigging infrastructure needed to fly high-end music sound systems.
They're the same carts we've always been using, and also used for the Netflix NFL Christmas Day show, just more of them, says Kirk Powell, engineer in charge, ATK Audiotek/Clair Global Integration, who is overseeing the sound system. He notes that the usual 16 carts will increase to 18 this year, both to better fill the 68,500-seat open stadium and to deliver the low-frequency punch needed for Bad Bunny's hip-hop style. The field has been a challenge because it's real turf, but there's no way to fly a PA in Levi's. Also, there are physical-space limitations here that we don't have to deal with when we fly a system, such as no sideline space. We have only what's on the carts this year. But we've done carts for many, many years; we're just going back to the older-school way.
Sound Design by the Numbers
The carts - which are older than some of the players on the gridiron - were designed more than two decades ago by now-retired ATK founder Scott Harmala but are described by Powell as very, very sturdy. Each is loaded with either four or five speaker combinations of L-Acoustics K1/K2 Series speakers and KS28 subs, depending on which part of the bowl they're positioned for.
The locations also determine the degree of contour that essentially aims the speaker for precise coverage reaching both the lower and upper seating tiers. For instance, Powell explains, the press-box side of the field has only the lower seating bowl to cover, requiring four boxes per cart at relatively shallow angles; the other side, however, faces the upper deck, necessitating five boxes and at steeper angles. Offsetting that, though, is the fact that an open stadium eliminates almost all the acoustical issues that could be faced in an enclosed venue.
Sound-system designer Johnny Keirle, working his fifth Super Bowl with ATK/Clair Global Integration and his first with cart-mounted speakers, did the calculations, using L-Acoustics' Soundvision modeling software to predict angles and locations to optimize coverage.
There needs to be a good amount of low-frequency information, but I also consider things like directivity and speech intelligibility, he explains, enumerating basic considerations. Also, making sure there's not excessive SPL on the field itself to affect either the performance or the broadcast sound.
As the entertainment part of the event evolved and program and performance changes were made, Keirle says, he was essentially designing the system for the venue rather than for the artists, then sharing the metrics with the audio teams of the performers and other technical stakeholders as they came on board.
One of the challenging things for me is that I have to submit my designs before I know who the artist is, he explains. That's quite a unique scenario. Normally, you are designing a system for a particular artist and factor in everything from genre to their expectations for system performance and level. With the Super Bowl, I'm putting together system designs before the artist is even chosen. I start with a blank canvas and put together something that is going to do what I think it needs to do.
Strategy To Keep the Music Secret
Aside from making sure the sound gets to where it's supposed to be for the show, he also has to try to make sure it stays inside the bowl during rehearsals. Setlists have been an obsession for music fans since the Grateful Dead's touring heyday; it's more true now with setlists widely shared on social-media sites ahead of tour stops by mega-shows, such as Taylor Swift's Eras expedition. In fact, in the age of prediction-market wagering, big bets can be won and lost online over setlist content.
A big part of what the [Super Bowl halftime] show is about is the surprise factor, Keirle acknowledges, both for which songs will be performed and any unannounced guest artists.
Unlike a roofed venue, Levi's Stadium will let some of that sound escape during run-through
