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Bristol City Football Club Chooses New Sound System from Harman Pro and Sounds Commercial
Bristol City Football Club (BCFC) has marked its promotion to the Championship by installing a brand new sound system at its Ashton Gate stadium.
The installation incorporates two BSS Soundweb London networking systems that control the nine Crown CTS2000 amplifiers with USP3/CN PIP cards. The system is running at low impedance and so the amplifiers are split over two racks in two locations – one in the Williams Stand and the other in the Dolman Stand – and are connected by a zero loss fibre network. All of this equipment was supplied by Harman Pro UK, which was chosen as a main supplier because of the breadth of its product range and the technical and after-sales support it was able to offer.
BCFC had been considering an upgrade to its audio facilities for some time and awarded Bristol-based systems integration company Sounds Commercial the contract to design, install and commission the new system.
Damian Orritt, installation contracts manager of Sounds Commercials, says: “The old system was underpowered and also very dated in terms of equipment, range and reliability. There was little or no fault monitoring and quite simply was not up to the club’s expectations for the forthcoming season.”
The major consideration was that that the stadium public address system must broadcast voice communication, a message from the Fire Service and from the Police. Therefore a comprehensive high power sound system was proposed that would deliver clear speech at high levels to all public areas within the stadium. The loudspeaker elements for the stands are from a specialist range of products designed for clear voice communication in stadia and arenas.
A secondary requirement for the sound system was that it should support music playback on match days. The proposed sound system would deliver good quality, high power music reproduction into the stadium seating.
As well as the aspect of a rounded entertainment package, a sound system can have an important role in crowd control. By keeping the spectators entertained with good quality sound, coupled with good material and presentation, it has been found that crowd trouble can be averted.
An implicit requirement is that the system should be compliant with standards, robust, fail safe, and self monitoring. The proposed sound system contains features that will allow the system to continue operation in the presence of fault conditions, and will generate alerts when faults are detected.
Ashton Gate Stadium also hosts large music events and so the new design would be incorporated into PA systems brought in with such promotions.
Orritt says: “We came up with a design that effectively started from scratch and, after consultation with Capita Symonds, who are appointed as the consultants for the general overhaul of the stadium, we were commissioned to install it. Throughout this project we have worked closely with Capita Symonds’ Stephen P. Jones, Venue Technology expert within the Acoustics Division and with Harman’s acoustic designer Tom Williams, who has helped us iron out any technical issues.”
The newly designed system, powered by Crown CTs2000 amplifiers, and driven by Soundweb London feeds 48 new loudspeaker cabinets installed around the stadium. The London Architect control software for systems has reached version 1.14 and now allows programmers to make use of macros in their setups. Macros combine a series of pre-defined routing, logic and/or processing software blocks into one macro file which can be easily emailed or made available for Internet download.
Orritt adds: “The Crown CTS2000 amplifiers were chosen because they were perfect for this application as they deliver plenty of reliable power and offer an independent selection of high and low impedance for specific channels. As well as providing the speaker circuit fault monitoring functionality required as our system design was to comply with BS5839 part 8, BS7827 and IECBS60849.”
Sounds Commercial is also installing a new DJ booth in the Dolman Stand and has supplied the club with a section of AKG in-ear monitors and microphones. To comply with the latest health and safety regulations, all of the cabling installed is Low Smoke Zero Halogen and steel wire armoured, much of which was supplied by VDC Trading.
BCFC’s new sound system takes in three of the club’s four stands and was fully operational by August 2007, in time for its first home game in the Championship against QPR. Redevelopment of the Wedlock stand is expected to be announced in the near future and so the system components will be extended to cover both the internal and external areas of this new development.
19th September 2007
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