DirectOut Provides Fully Redundant Audio Infrastructure

DirectOut supplied more than 80 of its Smart Audio Platforms to deliver complete redundancy for the 2025 Jubilee of Youth Papal Mass, an event that drew more than one million attendees to Rome.

Known for manufacturing highly reliable audio solutions, the company played a central role in ensuring uninterrupted sound throughout one of the Catholic Church’s most significant global gatherings.

Held in August 2025, the Jubilee for Youth marked a Holy Year celebration that takes place every 25 years, bringing together hundreds of thousands of young people for prayers, masses and a week-long pilgrimage culminating in entry to the Vatican’s Major Basilicas through the Holy Doors. With an audience area spanning more than five kilometres, the scale of the production required an extensive and fail-safe audio setup.

Italian production company EventManagement installed over 80 towers across the site, each equipped with PA systems, large video screens and DirectOut Smart Audio Platforms. The towers received feeds from a RAVENNA Audio-over-IP network and were engineered with full redundancy across every link in the chain. Additional DirectOut systems were deployed at front of house, on stage and within the broadcast audio infrastructure, bringing the total number of smart platforms to nearly 100.

The vast layout meant the travel time from the first tower to the last took more than six minutes by car, and the natural audio delay between them exceeded five seconds. These towers carried not only the Papal Mass audio and visuals but also emergency messaging—making system failure unacceptable.

The system was designed by DirectOut’s Luca Giaroli, whose extensive portfolio includes audio network design for major international productions such as the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Euro 2020 and the Beijing 2008 Olympic ceremonies. His experience proved essential in creating a multilayered redundancy strategy capable of withstanding any technical or human failure.

A critical part of the design was a disaster recovery plan that utilized terrestrial TV receivers installed in each tower. In a total network outage, the towers could automatically switch to the live broadcast signal, ensuring continuous delivery of audio and video.

An additional local emergency switch allowed the main show feed to fade out while activating a microphone connected to each tower, enabling volunteer stewards to address the crowd instantly with safety instructions.

The redundancy was made possible by DirectOut's Smart Audio Platforms, programmed to detect network loss and transition seamlessly to backup sources. This behaviour formed the backbone of Giaroli's resilient system.

"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 explained. "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."

The Jubilee of Youth was the result of more than two years of planning by Giaroli and his engineering team. Their meticulous preparation—and the precision engineering of DirectOut technology—ensured the historic Papal Mass proceeded flawlessly, allowing more than a million young worshippers to hear the message they had travelled from around the world to experience.

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