Harman Professional Shows Its World-Class Capabilities At Spectacular Opening Ceremony For Expo 2010 Shanghai China

Harman brands BSS Audio, Crown Audio JBL, Soundcraft and Studer will support the theme of the world’s largest-ever world’s trade fair, “Better City – Better Life”, with the advantage that Harman Professional technology brings to everything application: “Better Sound”

SHANGHAI, China — Underscoring its leadership in audio technology design and manufacturing, Harman (NYSE: HAR), a leading provider of branded audio and infotainment electronics for the home, the car, and sound professionals, today announced that key Harman products will play a crucial role in the Opening Ceremony for Expo 2010 Shanghai China, which takes place on April 30, 2010, in Shanghai.

The ceremonies, which will inaugurate the world’s largest-ever trade fair, where an anticipated 70 to 100 million attendees will view exhibits from over 200 countries during the event’s 6-month duration, will be dramatic, including music, vocalists, dancers and pyrotechnics.   The World Expo Opening ceremony, produced by DAE, will be an ambitious, highly coordinated multi-site spectacle with synchronized indoor programs at both the Expo Center and Performance Center and outdoor programs at the Celebration Square and along the Huangpu River.  An audience of 40,000 is expected to view these magnificent presentations. To assure that the ceremony will have the absolute best sound possible, the event planners have turned to BSS Audio and Crown Audio, JBL, Soundcraft and Studer to provide the most reliable and advanced audio technology in the world.

The technical scale of World Expo 2010 Shanghai is stunning and vast: the sound will need to cover over 3.2 million square feet of event space; 440 channels of Crown amplification totaling 350,000 watts of power as well as nearly 40 miles of fiber-optic cabling will be deployed – its total length can encircle the Tiananmen Square in Beijing 23 times! To meet these enormous requirements, the highly sophisticated Studer Route 6000 audio router’s 1728x1728 I/O capability is more than sufficient to address the 536 I/Os the audio systems will require, including 24 channels of stereo upmixed to 5.1 and 5.1 surround audio downmixed to stereo for the broadcast portions of the shows. The audio will be processed using 165 BSS Audio BLU 160 signal processors, creating a matrix of 660 channels of EQ, delay and dynamics processing. The audio will be delivered to the massive crowds though a number of JBL systems which will include a large distributed system utilizing Control 29AV two-way loudspeakers.  The primary loudspeaker system for Celebration Square will include Vertec VT-4889 and VT4880A line array clusters.  VRX Series will also be used in some select areas for the ceremonies.

“The scale of these ceremonies will be truly astounding,” explained Michael MacDonald, Harman Professional executive vice president of marketing & sales, noting that it will take a small army of 80 technicians 40 days to put all of the systems in place. “The scale, performance and reliability that an event like this demands can only be provided by a family of companies that are found within Harman. We’re extremely pleased to be working with Expo 2010 Shanghai China and show producer DAE to assure that these opening ceremonies will be the most amazing ever seen.”

Harman HiQnet™ is the world's first connectivity and control protocol that integrates all product categories in the signal chain for professional audio systems of all types, size, and applications. Harman HiQnet no longer requires the user to manage multiple disparate operating systems or be responsible for programming individual signal processors, speaker controllers, wireless microphone systems, and mixing consoles. HiQnet was developed by engineers from across Harman’s Professional Division and is coordinated by the System Development and Integration Group (SDIG), a team of dedicated systems specialists based in Salt Lake City, Utah.