Perched atop the Bird’s Nest with Jason Zhang at Beijing National Stadium.
Celebrated Chinese pop star Jason Zhang recently made history by performing 12 consecutive concerts in Beijing powered by an unprecedented d&b sound system hanging from the top of the city’s iconic National Stadium.
The double-sided spectacle broke new ground both musically and in live sound, as Nanjing OST Audiovisual Technology and the team around legendary audio engineer Jin Shaogang suspended a massive d&b SL-Series system of 512 loudspeakers from a network of steel cables spanning 126 metres across the venue’s distinctive roof.
The achievement marks the first time China has seen a cable-suspended audio deployment for a stadium concert.
Turning the stadium’s impressive architecture into a creative challenge, the team rigged the line arrays along the edge of the roof. Further loudspeakers were suspended in the air centrally, high above a thin, rectangular stage in the middle of the Bird’s Nest, as it is colloquially called.
Four groups of GSL large-format line array loudspeakers hung back-to-back above the stage covered the inner field, middle and rear areas of the first floor stands, complemented by two groups of SL-SUB arrays hung to the side. Six groups of KSL medium-format loudspeakers strung along the ceiling bowl targeted the second and third floor stands. Several SL-SUB subwoofers were stacked along the stage, while V-Series and monitor speakers covered the front fill. The total of 512 speakers deployed is almost double what is normally used for a regular three-sided stage performance at the stadium.
The setup ensured the entire audience of 70,000 fans, seated on both sides of the stage in the bowl to the upper deck in the stands, experienced studio-quality audio reproduction each night without hindering visibility of the show. One of China’s biggest pop artists, Jason Zhang started his career by winning the televised singing competition My Show in 2004 and is known locally as Zhang Jie.
This acoustic feat relied on d&b’s revolutionary SL-Series for full-range directivity control that delivered pristine highs and perfectly focused low frequencies across the entire stadium. The system’s cardioid SL-SUB subwoofers utilised advanced driver cancellation to reduce stage noise by 50 percent, while Jin’s team used d&b’s sophisticated ArrayProcessing technology to maintain near-perfect sound pressure levels within 3 dB throughout the extremely large venue.
Zhang Xiaonian, Sound Engineering Production Director for Nanjing OST, said ArrayProcessing enabled his team to tackle several complex issues that a traditional solution would not have been able to address.
Originally build for the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing National Stadium’s grand scope presented several challenges that the technical team had to overcome: besides maintaining signal integrity across 150-metre cable runs using d&b's LoadMatch technology, they had to synchronise 12 strategically placed KSL delay systems to create perfect coherence between the main stage and distant mixing position in the VIP boxes.
For the special 12-concert run, Zhang Xiaonian’s team also opted specifically for the latest D90 amplifiers, along with D40 and D80 units, to get the most out of its d&b loudspeakers.
Nanjing OST’s significant investment in this next-generation SL-Series rig represents a quantum leap forward for China’s live event production capabilities. Jason Zhang’s audience experienced the beginning of a new standard in large-scale concert engineering, setting a benchmark that will undoubtedly resonate for years to come.
