A recent full upgrade of the Municipal Stadium in Ostrów Wielkopolski, Poland, included the use of Apex CloudPower remotely managed amplifiers. The refit was of the motorcycle speedway venue was prompted by the promotion of home team, Arged Malesa Ostrów Wielkopolski, to the premier PGE Ekstraliga division.
Established distributor of pro audio equipment, Tommex was awarded the contract to design, deliver and commission an audio system fit for the needs of a modern, top-tier venue. The company had just 99 days to complete the installation before the start of the new season, with upgrades to seating and lighting taking place at the same time.
The stadium has a roofed stand on the west side, while the remaining stands are open, resulting in less sound reflection and almost no reverberation. Passionate fans in the stands and powerful engines on the track conspire to make speedway an inherently loud sport, so the primary challenge for Tommex was to deliver high sound pressure levels and excellent speech intelligibility, allowing the audience to clearly hear announcements above the background noise.
Key Account Manager, Tomasz Lulkiewicz, selected Apex CloudPower CP1504 four-channel amplifiers to feed numerous RCF P series loudspeakers deployed to provide coverage to the track, covered stand and open seating areas. A total of four CP1504s were, with each serving eight loudspeakers and providing up to 1.5kW per output channel. A Yamaha MTX5-D matrix handles distribution of signals to the amplifiers, with a Yamaha PGM1 paging microphone directly connected to the matrix in the control room. The stadium’s announcer uses Sennheiser EW 100 wireless microphones and a variety of media players, connected to a Yamaha MG16XU mixing console. Audio is carried from the control room to the amplifiers via Dante, with a Radio Design Labs AV-LN4 converter used to convert analogue signals from the mixer.
The CloudPower amplifiers can be configured and managed remotely from a smartphone or laptop, a feature appreciated by the Tommex team: ‘In projects of this scale, we are working with a lot of long cable runs and significant distances between the speakers and the control room,’ Lulkiewicz explains. ‘Being able to make adjustments from anywhere in the venue saved us a lot of precious time, and we found the IntelliCloud WebUI really easy to work with. The CloudPower amplifiers sound great, and they deliver a lot of power at a realistic price.’
Tommex successfully completed the audio update of Ostrów Wielkopolski Municipal Stadium in time for the start of the 2022 PGE Ekstraliga season in April.
See also:
Tommex takes on Apex distribution in Poland
