The opening of the 16th Guangdong Provincial Games and the 9th Guangdong Provincial Games for Persons with Disabilities in Qingyuan saw more than 20,000 athletes, coaches and related staff taking part, making it the largest Guangdong provincial games to date.
The main venue for the events was the 30,000-seat Qingyuan Olympic Sports Center, designed in the shape of a soaring phoenix and comprising a stadium, a 9,000-seat gymnasium, 2,000-seat natatorium and an Olympic sports park capable of hosting large-scale competitions, concerts and exhibitions. Chinese A/V solutions provider EZPro International supplied sound reinforcement for the Sports Center with two criteria in mind.
‘First, reliability is absolutely critical for the sound reinforcement system when hosting large-scale competitions,’ explains Zhang EZPro Senior Technical Manager, Yangyang. ‘Additionally, due to the long reverberation time of the large venue space, the sound field design needs to be augmented to achieve the ideal sound pressure levels and, importantly, speech intelligibility.’
With these requirements in mind, EZPro on Allen & Heath SQ mixers fot the heart of the audio system. In the stadium, a pair of A&H SQ-7 mixers, with 32 onboard preamps and six layers of 33 faders, served as primary and backup systems to ensure no downtime in the audio output.
The SQ range of mixers is built on a proprietary XCVI FPGA mix engine that supports 48 channels/36 audio buses at 96kHz audio with <0.7ms latency and phase coherent internal mix paths. All SQ mixers feature a 64-channel I/O port for audio networking and can be expanded with Deep processing add-ons for processing on all channels.
Both SQ-7 mixers were equipped with SQ Dante cards with the Primary and Secondary ports being used to supply a redundant audio link to the power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Three A&H DT168 Dante audio expanders, each providing 16 XLR inputs and 8 XLR outputs, were also used for remote I/O over a Dante network.
The gymnasium adopted the same dual SQ-7 configuration as the stadium, while the natatorium was equipped with a smaller 25-fader SQ-6 mixer.
‘The Allen & Heath SQ mixing systems ticked all the boxes for this prestigious event – compact form factor, Dante compatible, high-resolution audio, and easy to set up and operate,’ Zhang concludes. ‘Additionally, the integrated channel and bus processing ensured that the speech and music were clear for the competitors, spectators, and event staff. Everyone was happy with the results.’
