GOLDEN DISC AWARDS CELEBRATE K-POP WITH NEXO

Jan 2019 | News | Live Events | STM | South Korea

 The Korean K-Pop phenomenon celebrates itself every year at the Golden Disc Awards, staged in Seoul.  Audio production provider for seven years, Way Audio has found the means to tame the huge space that is the Gocheok Sky Dome, using a large modular PA system, the STM Series from NEXO.

Last year saw K-POP take the USA by storm, as boyband BTS filled baseball stadia in Los Angeles and New York, as well as the European capital cities, with their loyal fanbase known as the ARMY.

Every January, this musical genre holds its own awards ceremony back home in Seoul, featuring performances by many of its big names: BTS, EXO, Twice, Red Velvet, Black Pink, Momoland and Mamamoo, among others.  The domed baseball stadium houses 25,000 K-Pop fans, and the show is broadcast live by JTBC.

The Sky Dome is one of Korea’s largest indoor venues, and the largest-capacity stadium.  Designed to evoke the shape and movement dynamic of a baseball, the structure presents huge acoustic challenges for sound reinforcement.  However, local production rental house Way Audio has serviced many large concert events at Gocheok, with Yun Cheol Lee tailoring his system designs to perform perfectly in the huge stadium.

“The reverberation time and reflections created inside the venue, with its high roof, cause a lot of problems for visiting audio rental companies,” explains James Lee, MD of AWorks, distributor of NEXO sound reinforcement equipment in South Korea.  “Do Gil Kim and Joon Ho Kang are also key members of a Way Audio team that has more experience than anyone else of how to design efficiently, using NEXO’s modelling and prediction software tools, to get a pleasing result in this location.”

NEXO’s modular line array is a key component of Way Audio’s success, running over a Dante network and highly controllable thanks to the NeMo software suite.  Set up with a main PA comprising 15 sets of M46 main and B112 bass modules, with M28 downfills, the system also used the smaller M28 cabinets as 4-point delays, and as frontfills.  All stage monitoring was through NEXO PS15 cabinets.

All channel signals were mixed at FOH by Joon Ho Kang, Way Audio’s general manager, before being sent to the OB van for JTBC’s live broadcast.  “The STM system is very versatile and multi-purpose,” confirmed James Lee, “it is ideal for rock ‘n’ roll as well as K-pop, and Way Audio is always busy with it, getting many enquiries from the K-Pop world as well as other entertainment companies.”

Further information:

Way Audio Co.Ltd

Tel: +82 2 2661 5310