Home to the Debreceni Vasutas Sport Club, Nagyerdei Stadion was opened on 1 May 2014 and the first official match was played between Debrecen and Újpest, which ended with a 3-1 victory for the host team. As well as hosting Debreceni VSC games, the stadium will host matches for the Hungarian national football team. The ground also incorporates conference and banqueting suites and has a club shop selling Debrecen merchandise.
Zoltán Horváth, chief engineer of Interton Ltd, explained the basis for the system design, "Community loudspeakers are our first choice for stadium systems, and we have completed many successful projects with R Series. The brief for Nagyerdei, in addition to good speech intelligibility, was for discrete styling and high quality music, so the obvious choice was the weather-resistant version of the iHP-1596 from the iBOX Series, which provided the power, wide frequency response and aesthetics the client wanted. An EASE simulation was carried out to confirm the design would meet the required criteria."
The audio system network is provided by a Q-SYS system, with one Core250i and the required number of I/O Frames. The main arena sound system uses four I/O Frames and twenty-eight PLX3102 amplifiers, located in four rack rooms. These amplifiers drive fifty-three Community iHP-1596WR loudspeakers, mounted below the outside edge of the canopy and providing sound to the 360-degree grandstand and to the playing field. The iHP-1596WR is a premium quality large-format 15-inch full-range loudspeaker system with 90 x 60 degree coverage. "The results are impressive," comments Horváth. "It's a really nice sounding system with great SPL to inform and entertain a capacity crowd."
In addition to the main arena PA, Interton designed and installed the audio systems for the venue's main buildings and studio and also supplied a mobile conference system. Interton additionally installed the scoreboards and the perimeter display, the video distribution system and more than 100 LCD displays. Audio and video distribution are Ethernet based using the stadium's LAN.
An inauguration ceremony was held for the opening of Nagyerdei Stadion by Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. After sanctification by leaders of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic Church, singers including Lou Bega, Viktor Király, Ildikó Kersztes, Gigi Radi? and Erika Miklósa entertained the audience at the celebration.
(Jim Evans)
