Super Bowl LIX: Beyonc's Holiday NFL Halftime Show Resets the Wireless-Audio Bar - Again

Super Bowl LIX: Beyonc 's Holiday NFL Halftime Show Resets the Wireless-Audio Bar - Again Veteran team preps for Kendrick Lamar's turn on the Super Bowl Halftime Show By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Thursday, January 30, 2025 - 7:00 am

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New Orleans Mardi Gras veterans will tell you that planning for the next one seems to start the day after. The same is said about Super Bowl Halftime Shows. Planning for the audio production of rapper Kendrick Lamar's solo headlining appearance at Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9 in New Orleans may have started on Feb. 12, 2024, but, after Beyonc 's jaw-dropping halftime spectacular at the NFL's Ravens-Texans game in Houston on Christmas Day, the timeline has become a bit shorter.

The speed and scale of the Beyonc Bowl' were unprecedented, says Jimmy Van Winkle, GM, Professional Wireless Systems (PWS). It was every bit the size and complexity of a Super Bowl Halftime Show, with less than two months of preparation.

Beyonc 's NFL halftime show on Christmas Day featured hundreds of musicians and dancers, all wearing wireless mics or monitors. (All photos: NFL)

It was indeed a Beyonc Bowl - a 13-plus-minute spectacular pageant in which the 32-time Grammy Award winner entered NRG Stadium on a white stallion and was joined by Shaboozey, Post Malone, and hundreds of dancers, singers, and musicians, including the Texas Southern University Ocean of Soul marching band. It required more than 200 channels of wireless audio spread across a wide RF spectrum.

Channel Counts Keep Growing Even as he readies his wireless team for Super Bowl LIX, Van Winkle looks back at Super Bowl LVI's rap spectacular in 2022 as an inflection point in these productions. The show featured Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, Lamar, and others, each with redundant wireless microphones, and an estimated 150 dancers in the field, all with wireless in-ear monitors. Shakira's 2020 Super Bowl show's wireless channel count was in the low hundreds. The huge number of dancers, who need the in-ear monitors to maintain sync, has become common in these productions, he says, driving up the wireless channel counts. The performances have also become more elaborate since the NFL's 2019 partnership with Roc Nation, the production company owned by Beyonc 's partner and husband, Jay-Z.

The elaborate productions attract viewers to these shows. In Netflix's first NFL outing, Beyonc 's performance reportedly scored 27 million viewers, with a reported nearly 50 million more seeing it within another 10 days.

Beyonc 's show also represented the next milestone in a decade-plus-long trend in which sports/music spectaculars have become a kind of digital Busby Berkley production. The details for Lamar's halftime show are still under wraps, but there has been plenty of buzz about how it may have to somehow top Beyonc 's extravaganza, which ended with her riding an ascending platform high above the field.

Specialized Infrastructure and Spectrum Given a timeline of only six weeks for the Dec. 25 event, the PWS team conducted a site survey to determine optimal antenna placement and gather crucial sweep data. For the event, the team, which has handled wireless audio for Super Bowl pre/postgame and halftime shows for 27 years, managed frequencies for both Sennheiser and Shure wireless microphones and Wisycom and Shure in-ear monitors (IEMs), working alongside NFL game-day staff, Netflix's broadcast crew, and stadium technicians.

Scale was a challenge, as was Houston's own dense RF environment, which combined with broadcast's particular RF needs. It compelled PWS to divide the field and other areas, such as the under-stadium staging and entrance areas where the horses were readied, into multiple zones, adding complexity.

The halftime show at NRG Stadium required an antenna system providing coverage from the tunnel to the flying finale.

She starts in the tunnel and then enters the stadium, says PWS Lead RF Engineer Cameron Stuckey, so we're sort of at the negative-18-or negative-20-yard line. We're behind the field of play, which is atypical for a Super Bowl Halftime Show, which are usually limited to the field itself. We're three or four minutes into the show before she even hits the zero-yard line. And then [she] went vertical right at the end of the show, which is another zone to cover. We're making sure that, for her, it's basically seamless once she enters the building all the way through the end of the show on top of that flying platform.

PWS's Cameron Stuckey: We designed an antenna system that gave the creative teams complete freedom on the field.

PWS designed and deployed a comprehensive RF-over-fiber antenna system covering UHF and STL (studio transmitter link) frequencies, in the 941-960 MHz band, to support wireless microphones and IEMs. That offers a very low noise floor, which Stuckey says is super helpful for what we do in crowded places. To ensure seamless connectivity across the vast performance area, the team deployed 10 helical antennas comprising four STL units, four standard UHF antennas for microphones, and two dedicated for dual IEM zones.

We designed an antenna system that gave the creative teams complete freedom on the field, he says. The entire football field is the creative team's canvas, and RF coverage can't be a limiting factor. For the Beyonc Bowl, choreography stretched across 80 yards of turf, with her duet with Shaboozey on one side of the field and then 50 yards away, she performed with Post Malone. This is in addition to managing coverage in the Z axis for the flying finale that expanded coverage needs vertically.

In Every Ear Van Winkle credits NFL's event-frequency coordinators, Netflix's broadcas

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