Twickenham Stoop is today home to both the NEC Harlequins Rugby Union and Harlequins RL Rugby League teams. With Rugby Union playing the winter season and Rugby League the summer season, the stadium is in use throughout the year and in all weather.
Catalyst has been handling the installation and maintenance of the public address facilities for the Stoop for over four years and were again appointed to design and install the system for the new Lexus stand in 2006. The system is required for recorded music and live commentary and had to meet the usual requirements for open air sports facilities - very high intelligibility with tightly controlled dispersion to give full audience coverage whilst minimising spillage from the ground.
Catalyst's Richard Hall reports, "We installed 16 Community R.5-99X to the front edge of the stand canopy to achieve the ideal coverage with minimum spill. The audio performance and dispersion of these loudspeakers is perfect for this application and has given us an excellent system. Each loudspeaker is fitted with an external 300W/100V line transformer and driven independently from a 480W/100V line amplifier. This gives comfortable headroom for fierce bursts of celebratory music - a pleasingly frequent happening! It also accommodates the de-rating of the amplifier when powered by 24V DC battery-based mains power back-up".
(Jim Evans)
