Over 600 d&b loudspeakers, nearly 150 D80 amplifiers, and twenty nine delay
towers for one stage; this was an event on an almost unprecedented scale. Blonia
Park, near Poland’s ancient city of Krakow, was the venue for the thirteenth World
Youth Day. Since the inaugural gathering in Rome in 1986, the Catholic Church has
invited young people of all faiths and persuasions to congregate at events held
globally, from Toronto to Sydney to Denver, to Manila in the Philippines. World
Youth Day 2016 presented an opportunity for Pope Francis to engage with hundreds
of thousands of young people who were also treated to a music festival on a
massive scale: bands of all different backgrounds and genres, and a large number
of soloists. All of which represented a herculean task for GMB pro sound, the audio
company responsible for providing sound reinforcement across the forty eight
hectare site.

With such a vast amount of d&b onsite GMB’s Remigiusz Kasztelnik called in support
from d&b Application Support; Janko Ramuscak describes the collaboration: “Credit
has to go to GMB for the success of this event. Remigiusz Kasztelnik, Janusz
Klimowicz, Paweł Adamowicz and Kamil Zajdel made the design and chose to go
with more than 430 J-Series speakers in order to provide enough full range
potential throughout the area. There was a main PA system made of two long J-
Series arrays left and right, infills comprising V-Series and two pairs of outfills,
realized with hangs of J-Series and V-Series respectively. The rest of the J-Series
cabinets were used on twenty nine delay towers. The number and placement of the
towers was specified by a consultant working for the church; each of these arrays
contained between eight and sixteen boxes. There were also nearly fifty B22-SUBs
placed near the stage, and over thirty J-SUBs hung on the first ring of delay
towers.’

The whole system was controlled through the d&b R1 Remote control network, from
a central control container located behind FoH. The audio and network distribution
was realized via Optocore, with a d&b DS10 Audio network bridge in every tower,
serving as a switch and multicast filter. Audio-wise, there were several consoles at
FoH to submix the symphonic orchestra, choir, band, and of course the main altar.
Their signals were, in turn, routed through another master console in the control
container that served as the master audio hub and visualized the signals coming in
via the various submixes. “Obviously, there were several redundancies built into
that system,’ adds Ramuscak, “to make sure any fault in one component wouldn’t
compromise the whole system. But as those things go, the careful planning resulted
in them not being needed during the show – everything just worked.