Powersoft Helps Bring the Wizarding World to Life

Harry Potter fans have had their fantasy world brought to life in Brisbane with ‘Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience’ running at Mount Cotton’s Sirromet Winery in August and September. The illuminated, immersive night walk installation lets fans experience iconic moments from the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies, be menaced by a Dementor and Aragog the giant spider, and cast their own interactive spells.

The experience has already played in nine cities across four continents, including Melbourne, and is concurrently running in Chicago. Over two million fans have come through the gates, making it one of the largest interactive experiences in the world by audience. In Australia, experience and ticketing company Fever, in a joint venture with global sport and culture agency IMG, are the producers, licensing the IP from Warner Brothers.

All of that IP, installation, props, lighting, sound, and control is brought technically to life by a key team that travels the globe, with local, on-the-ground technical management. Paul Osborne, Director at Catapult Creative Productions, was technical and production manager for Fever on the first Australian iteration in Melbourne in 2024, and has returned for the 2025 Brisbane season.

While a lot of attention is on the physical and illuminated aspects of the experience, audio is incredibly important.

“As you walk along, every five to 10 metres, there’s a speaker, so there’s around 400 speakers out in the forest; it’s completely immersive,” explains Paul. “The content is very localised – wherever you are, you are only hearing the audio that you’re meant to hear at that location. The audio programme is a mix of orchestral score, dialogue from the movies, and effects. There’s narrative with characters from the film talking to each other. There’s a section called ‘Voices’, which is sections from the films being whispered in your ear as you walk along.”

Some audio effect moments are designed to make the sound seem to come from an object or location. In these areas, the background speakers are supplemented by larger speakers set in the forest to achieve the effects. For example, the howl of werewolves in the distance, or a big ‘wooosh’ when a guest casts a spell.

It’s a dense and complicated audio system, with each zone functioning differently. “In terms of audio channels, it’s hard to define an actual channel count,” Paul elaborates. “There are channels within channels; some sections are done just with a track that plays. Other sections are an orchestral score supplemented by effects. Then there’s triggers within various props that trigger an audio cue. And some of the cues are interactive, triggered by the actions of the guests. It all adds up to a lot of channels.”

To run the show, the technical systems use a ‘hub and spoke design’ with a central control location and 20 sheds built across the site to house power, audio amplifiers, and signal distribution.

“There’s a show computer that runs everything on a cue-based system,” outlines Paul. “There’s one cue that overrides all the other cues called ‘The Voldemort Takeover’, which turns the whole site’s lighting green and the audio at every location into a cue about Voldermort looking for Harry Potter, then everything has to reset back to where it was. That adds a layer of complication to the control system. In terms of audio distribution, Dante is perfect for this project, and we use it to send audio to 37 amplified audio controllers out in the sheds in the forest.”

Those amplified audio controllers are 37 Powersoft T904s, originally specified by Andrew Johnson in the UK as Global Sound Designer for the project. They output 8000W over four channels, and come with internal DSP and Dante as standard. Audio equipment and support was provided out of NW Group’s Brisbane office.

“The choice of the Powersoft amps comes down to the fact that they’ve got Dante, they’ve got DSP, they have remote control via their Armonia software, and they have included presets for all of the different speaker brands we are using,” states Paul. “We are using every feature they have in this experience, and, of course, they sound great.”

In addition to their extensive feature list and flexibility, the Powersoft T904s had to be able to operate consistently in the harsh conditions. “With our gear having to live in a shed outside in the forest for four months, they also need to be very reliable,” confirms Paul. “There was a cyclone not long before we opened. In Brisbane at this time of year, when it rains, it rains properly. On top of the weather, you can lose power, and you have to expect that will happen. It’s the best ad for Powersoft in terms of being hardy enough to handle all of this. A lot of products in our world don’t like to be suddenly turned off and suddenly turned back on again.”

NW Group Brisbane’s General Manager Ray Moss was happy to invest in a few extra Powersoft amps to get the numbers that the project needed. “We’ve been evaluating our amp stock for a while, knowing that we’re going to refresh our workhorse amplifier,” says Ray. “When lined up with the requirements for Harry Potter, Powersoft ticked all the boxes. It’s the combination of onboard processing, flexibility, routing, and Dante as standard. They are also ridiculously lightweight and a lot of bang for buck.

Nothing else comes close for the money.”

The T904s can take input from Dante, AES3, and analog, with the Dante and AES3 inputs capable of daisy chaining directly, without the need for a network switch. While you can connect to a PC via Ethernet and use Armonia for full control, you can also attach a Wi-Fi- access point and get control on any device via a browser. Along with a huge speaker processing preset library, there’s also group controllable advanced EQ with raised cosine filters, and very long FIR filters, at 42.6ms.

Powersoft amplifiers are distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Production Audio Video Technology (PAVT).

www.pavt.com.au