DirectOut manufactures audio solutions that are renowned for their reliability, whatever the application. For an event which has the scale and importance of the Pope’s 2025 Jubilee for Youth, absolute redundancy is a complete necessity. DirectOut’s Luca Giaroli designed a network audio, video, and control system that would provide the perfect infrastructure, working tirelessly to ensure that the audience of over a million young people heard every word of this special Papal Mass.
A Jubilee or Holy year is recognized every 25 years by the Catholic church. The year offers an opportunity for Catholics to reset, renew faith and recommit to a just world. The Jubilee for Youth was a week-long international event that saw hundreds of thousands of young people complete prayers, masses and even a pilgrimage of faith that culminated in the chance to enter the Vatican Major Basilicas through the Holy Doors.
Held in Rome during August 2025, the event was produced on a huge scale, the audience area alone was over 5 kilometers wide, with over 80 towers delivering audio and visuals across the site. Installed by Italian production company, EventManagement, each tower was equipped with loudspeaker PA systems, huge video screens and DirectOut smart platforms.
These were fed from a RAVENNA Audio over IP distribution network and each tower benefitted from fail-safe redundancy, across the entire network. There were also additional DirectOut solutions in use across the front of house, stage and broadcast audio systems, with the total number of DirectOut smart platforms totaling almost 100.
The scale of the audience area was vast. The distance between the first and last towers took over six minutes to travel between in a car and the audio delay between them was over five seconds. These towers provided all audio and visual services, including emergency announcements, so failure was not an option.
Designer Giaroli has enjoyed a long career specializing in delivering complete redundancy for massive live and sporting events, including the design of the audio networks for huge international shows like the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Euro 2020 and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Opening and Closing ceremonies. This wealth of experience has left him well placed to deliver the layers of redundancy required to ensure an event of such high importance will go ahead smoothly.
His design for the Jubilee of Youth had to include an answer to every conceivable failure. This included an ingenious disaster recovery solution that relied on the audio and visual towers being fitted with a terrestrial TV receiver. This receiver could provide a direct transmission of the broadcast signal of the mass, so in the event of a complete network failure, the towers could still broadcast audio and visuals to the attendees.
The addition of an emergency local switch allowed the show feeds to be automatically faded out and made a microphone live to the PA tower. This ensured that, with very little explanation or training, any of the volunteer stewards could easy address the crowd, delivering critical safety information if required.
This was possible because the DirectOut smart platforms were programmed to automatically detect a failure and resulting lack of network signals, swapping seamlessly to a backup. This reliable functionality provided the backbone for Giaroli’s completely redundant design, ensuring that any failure, whether human or technical, could not interfere with the audience’s experience.
“I had to envision and anticipate potential problems in the main network and in the redundant network, therefore I couldn’t rely on just a main and backup. I needed a disaster recovery method, which would be ready for an entire network loss,” he explains. “Something that is impossible to stop is terrestrial TV. Nobody can stop the RF transmission, so from my very first designs, I included the possibility for to detect the absence of a network, routing the analogue signal from the audio of the TV broadcast towards the loudspeaker system. EventManagement implemented a combination of DirectOut smart platforms, including MAVEN.A and PRODIGY.MP perfectly to meet this requirement.”
Ensuring success for large-scale public events is not about luck, it is about carefully considered in-depth planning and the experience to choose the correct solutions for the application. For Giaroli, the Jubilee of Youth was the culmination of over two years of planning. His attention to detail and his audio expertise ensured that the show happened without a hitch and around a million young people heard what they had travelled far and wide to hear.
As he concludes, the mass and associated performances would not have happened without the technical expertise of his small team of engineers and the precision engineering of DirectOut solutions.
“This was a special environment,” he finishes. “I was uniquely responsible for not only the broadcast and amplification of the event, but also the delivery of emergency and housekeeping information. Whatever the available options, only the most reliable could be chosen and that had to be the DirectOut Smart Platforms.”
