World leaders trust Yamaha for G8 summit

On the occasion of the G8 Summit, Delta Sound responded to the most demanding requirements and exclusively chose Yamaha digital mixing consoles to respond to the sound needs at the meeting of the world's eight largest economies.

The eyes of the Western world were on the Northern Irish town of Enniskillen in mid-June, when the Lough Erne golf resort hosted the 39th annual G8 summit. As the leaders of eight of the world's largest economies debated “trade, transparency and taxes”, Yamaha mixing units ensured not a single word was missed.

With the participation of eight major world leaders, including Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin and David Cameron, media interest was exceptional. Delta Sound addressed demanding requirements and exclusively chose digital mixing consoles from Yamaha to respond to the sound needs of the summit.

Contracted by CTN Communications, Delta's experience at the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles and the 2009 G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world made them the perfect choice. Mark Sawyer, project manager, and a team of ten engineers installed a number of sound systems that handled translation and media reporting.

For the main meeting room where the summit was held, a Yamaha CL3, equipped with a DUGAN-MY16 automatic mixing card, was used to mix the microphone sound of all the leaders.

A second CL3 on the Dante network provided the signal to a team of simultaneous translators, whose audio was then returned to the leaders' headsets via Dante. The translated sound was also sent to the leaders' assistants, present in the meeting room.

A second system on the same Dante network was installed on the outside terrace of the Lough Erne Hotel, where David Cameron chaired the main post-summit press conference for the UK. A Yamaha M7CL console handled the mixing areas, streaming the audio back over the Dante network to the second CL3 and the translation teams. This time the translations were sent to the M7CL and broadcast to media outlets around the world.

For both systems, seven Yamaha R-series I/O units on the Dante network allowed audio inputs and outputs to be placed exactly where they were needed.

In addition, Yamaha LS9 consoles were used in three media rooms, two in the hotel itself and one in the nearby Killyhevlin hotel. Here the sound was mixed and sent to the world media at the press conferences of all the leaders, as well as the president of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso.

Although Delta engineers had a lot of experience with the M7CL and LS9, it was the first time they had the opportunity to use the CL3 and R-series units in the field and they were very impressed by their performance.

Mark Powell, technical engineer at Delta Sound, points out that "we had to provide a complete audio system that, involving top-level leaders, had to be extraordinarily reliable. With the translation of an essential part of the summit, they also had to provide great sound quality for both the leaders and for international broadcast."

"Dante is part of the Yamaha CL series and that allowed us to use it to connect the four systems to a central point from which we controlled everything. We needed a system that could handle a large number of exchanges and the Dante network did it perfectly. It made things much easier for us, even with a network that used more than 2 km of fiber optics," he adds.