Pope Francesco's Stadium Mass

The Holy See Pope Francesco gave mass at the Renato Dall'Ara Stadium in Bologna, Italy on October 17, 2017.

Executive Producer Massimo Ferranti of production company ABC, along with Marco Lecci were responsible for the audio department and both had previous success using K-array technology, so they turned to the Italian manufacturer once again. They required maximum intelligibility for speech and the musical interventions 470 singers and a small symphonic ensemble without having to clutter the area with Layher towers and bulky clusters. The acoustic prediction produced by Focus Ease guaranteed perfect and homogeneous coverage of the entire area for the public with two main clusters (LR) of 6 Firenze-KH7 line arrays 35m from each other and two side clusters of 4 Firenze-KH7 speakers to integrate at the 100 ° angle of the main system with another 100 ° horizontal opening. 

For the lower range frequency, an arc of 11 Mugello-KS5 subwoofers were employed. To avoid any surprises from the wind, 5 ground stacks formed by 5 Mugello-KH5 loudspeakers each were setup. At the last minute, ABC was asked to amplify some areas not included in the initial project and those areas were easily covered with two Pinnacle-KR402 portable systems and a Axle-KRX402 maintaining perfect timbre and phase consistency.

“The first listening immediately reassured us because from 50 meters we were able to perceive the system with clarity and appropriate levels from the speech to the various musical modulation without hardly being able to see it! K-array was able to minimize its overall footprint yet obtain excellent results in terms of frequency response and sound pressure!”

Marco Lecci (Sound Engineer)