Owned and managed by a subsidiary of the Norrköping Dolphins, the city's highly successful basketball team, building a new home venue for the team also meant that a major multi-purpose facility could be provided. Stadium Arena comprises four main areas. The main arena hosts basketball matches and other sports, live concerts and a wide variety of community events. Meanwhile a sports bar and restaurant provide further recreation opportunities, with the venue's main entrance combining circulation area, enquiry point and ticket office etc. To achieve maximum flexibility for all these areas, local audio contractor PADAB specified a Yamaha EtherSound distribution network.
"The main requirement was that sound could be distributed from a central source to each of the four zones, but with local control in each," says PADAB installation specialist Joachim Bergling."An early decision was taken to use a Yamaha EtherSound system for distributing the sound, because of the flexibility, audio quality and reliability that it delivers."
Central control and audio distribution is handled by a Yamaha DME24N digital mix engine with MY16-ES64 EtherSound card. Four DME Satellite DME4io-ES units are installed - one at the Front of House position in the main arena, with one each (plus CP4SW remote control) in the sports bar, restaurant and main entrance.
During a sports event, the sound operator uses a mobile rack with an eight channel mixer. Sound sources such as an announcer's microphone and background music source are fed from the mixer to the DME4io-ES, which sends the signal via EtherSound to the DME24N, distributing it to the other areas as required.
"The DME4io?ES in the main arena is also used for processing of the announcer's microphone, as the level can vary tremendously," says Joachim. "The high quality head amplifier of the DME4io?ES is great for this task, along with the built-in compressors and limiters."
The flexibility of the system also allows sound from any event in the main arena - such as music from live performances - to be routed to the sports bar, restaurant and main entrance zones.A house sound reinforcement system is provided in the main arena, comprising ten Yamaha Installation Series IF2115 full range loudspeakers with two IF2112 for down-fill, all driven by XP7000 and XP5000 amplifiers.
In the other three zones, the DME4io?ES in each is used both for receiving the EtherSound stream and to provide individual CD / microphone inputs and processing functions, plus local speaker control adjusted by the CP4SW remote control.
The entrance and the restaurant feature 16 100V speakers driven by Yamaha XP3500 amplifiers, while the Sports Bar has four 100V speakers and a 'sound roof' driven by Yamaha XP3500, P3500S and P5000S amplifiers.
(Lee Baldock)
