New Year’s Eve Fireworks over the Delaware River

The fireworks display over the Delaware River is the highlight of Philadelphia’s New Year’s Eve celebration and, for the past several years, Clear Sound has provided the audio support for this event. Viewers at Penn’s Landing and Camden’s Wiggins Park, as well as other prime locations such as Sugarhouse Casino, enjoy the fireworks synchronized with music carried on KYW Newsradio 1060. Clear Sound had teams at all three locations, using a system of GPS synchronized clocks as well as radio communications to coordinate the start of track playback with millisecond precision.

In many other types of large area shows, delay is introduced so that attendees can’t hear “echoes” of sound from speakers closer to the source. In this case, such a solution would cause the last tower of speakers to be out of sync with the fireworks display. Instead, Clear Sound used a hybrid solution, capitalizing on our diverse inventory of speakers to minimize delay. Towers of wide-throwing speakers were located at select centralized points to maximize coverage over the long stretch along the river.  These were supplemented with narrow-throw speakers to reach attendees toward the back while avoiding sound reflection from existing structures at each of the venues.

On the Camden side of the river, the area to be covered is particularly wide, and traditional cabling methods would not only by less reliable, but more prone to trip hazards. Clear Sound used silenced generators, and our proprietary long-range wireless audio transmission system to eliminate cabling between speaker towers.

As with all of our event productions, a customized solution, unobtrusive and safety-minded, ensured that all attendees experienced the full effect – music and fireworks in perfect synchronization.