Commissioned by King Louis XIV of France, the Haras National du Pin is the best-known horse-breeding farm of the network of national studs in France. The historic buildings still stand in the middle of the estate and, over time, have been added to and improved so that it has a lasting place in the history of the Normany region. Recently, Renkus-Heinz UBX Series column loudspeakers were installed to communicate effectively with riders in newly constructed outdoor training and competition facilities at the International Equestrian Sports Center.
The creation of the International Equestrian Sports Center is the first phase of four designed to make the Haras National du Pin ‘the first rural thematic destination in France’ later this decade. Comprising a reception building, car park, 300 air-conditioned horse stalls, two cabins for juries and four competition fields, the centre is intended to host all manners of equestrian competitions.
Equestrian staff contacted local integrator Auvisys to design an audio system for the sports centre and fields. Auvisys partnered with Etienne Berard, CEO of Renkus-Heinz’s French distributor Demoa, to model the sound coverage for each field and assist in the commissioning of the UBX loudspeakers.
‘The main challenge was throwing sound a long distance from a low elevation of 1.5m from the ground,’ Berard says. ‘That may not seem significant until you understand that two of the competition fields are 120m x 60m, and the others are 100m x 50m. The loudspeakers also had to be small so that they wouldn’t block the sightlines of the judges or audience members. UBX loudspeakers were perfect on both fronts.’
Auvisys installed two UBX8 loudspeakers at each of the larger competition fields and one at each smaller field. The UBX Series brings the precise coverage, high intelligibility and renowned sound quality of Renkus-Heinz’s flagship Iconyx loudspeakers into the realm of passive column arrays.
New for the UBX Series is Passive UniBeam Technology which addresses each transducer with specially designed all-pass filter networks, gain shading and additional frequency filtering to generate an asymmetrical vertical dispersion with constant directivity, delivering consistent front-to-back coverage with minimal side lobe artifacts. All models in the UBX Series are weather-resistant (IP64) out of the box with the included gland nut-protected input cover. The included 70/100V transformer, wall-mount bracket and standard weather resistance make UBX loudspeakers simple to integrate into any system design, whether indoor or outdoor.
‘The speech intelligibility across the wide fields was fantastic,’ Berard reports. ‘But the fact that it came from passive column loudspeakers was nothing short of astonishing. I highly recommend using UBX loudspeakers in future installations.’
