The system was specified by local pro audio, hi-fi and sound reinforcement specialist Joe Ritter and his company Ritter Medientechnik, based in Heilbronn, a few kilometres south of the installation.
Neckarsulm is a small town of under 30,000 inhabitants not far from Stuttgart, in Baden-Württemberg, south-western Germany. The town has a sizeable Audi factory, and is also the home of budget food retailer Lidl.
Ritter Medientechnik was approached by the administrators of the Ballei last year to assess the centre's superannuated PA system with a view to upgrading it. "However, the system was very old and had already been upgraded many times," explains Joe Ritter, "so I said an upgrade didn't make any sense. And then we went to a tender process. I was up against a powerful local dealer of another brand..."
Ritter has long been a user and advocate of Tannoy speakers in the hi-fi division of his company, and suggested that the concentric-driver, point-source approach of Tannoy's designs would be ideal for the sound reinforcement in the Ballei.
In the end, six Tannoy VQ100 speakers were used, arranged in three pairs, with four VSX18DR subwoofers distributed strategically around the hall. "We used six VQ cabinets because the sports hall can be sub-divided into three sections," explains Ritter. "A curtain comes down to divide the hall up for schools, so they can do different sports in each section. In each section, the VQs are placed back-to-back, one covering each section of the handball field, and the other facing the spectators for that section."
Ritter also has a long track record of using Lab.gruppen amplification, as he finds them very dependable. He contacted TC Group's German National Sales Manager Markus Portsworsnick for advice on which specific models to use, and Portsworsnick suggested the PLM series - specifically, three PLM 10000Q amps -with built-in Lake DSP processing.
Overall signal routing and management at the Ballei centre is handled by a Peavey Media Matrix system. The end users at the Ballei centre use the Peavey MX16 to determine which of the three sections in the hall are active, how they are fed, and whether the subs in each section are on or off.
(Jim Evans)
