Bregenz Festival - Floating Stage.

Award-winning sound design with Lawo. 

Every year, the Bregenz Festival takes place in the Austrian city of Bregenz at the Lake Constance. Every summer the audience can experience excellent open-air opera performances on the biggest floating stage worldwide.

Bregenz Open Acoustics

Bregenz Festival together with the cooperation partners Lawo and the Fraunhofer IDMT revolutionised the sound for these open-air operas by a new acoustical concept called Bregenz Open Acoustics (BOA). This new sound system is based on the principles of the wave field synthesis.

Technology

For the BOA project Lawo supplied three HD DSP cores for computing the directional mixing and the wave-field synthesis as well as two mc²66 live consoles connected to one HD core. The new acoustical concept made high demands on the complete system with regard to redundancy and resilience. The enormous performance of the Lawo DSP core makes realtime calculating of the directional mixer and the wave field synthesis possible. Due to the high DSP power and the capacity of 8192 mono channels, the technology works with extremely small latencies.

Redundancy

Redundancy and resilience were the main issues of the complete system. Thus the DSP board redundancy known from the mc²66 was also applied to the wave field synthesis and the directional mixer HD cores. All MADI connections between the HD cores are designed with redundant MADI port links. Thus Lawo has created a redundancy concept from the microphone input in the stage box to the output at the loudspeakers.

German Opus Award

In 2006, the Opus Award in the category of Sound Design, presented by the international prolight+sound exhibition, was awarded to BOA and its initiator Professor Wolfgang Fritz, Director of Sound at the Vienna State Opera and the Bregenz Festival for his merits in this project.  This German prize has been awarded since 2002 in the categories stage design, staging, lighting design and sound design.