Frequently referred to as one of the world’s most beautiful cricket grounds, the 4,500-capacity New Road ground is home to Worcestershire County Cricket Club (WCCC) – one of 18 first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales.
Requirimg a new PA system to provide clear announcements, music and entertainment across the site, the management turned to audiovisual integrator Hadleigh Technical Support (HTS) and distributors CUK Group, subsequently installing a Renkus-Heinz was loudspeaker system to keep New Road at the top of its game.
‘HTS has a long-standing relationship with Worcestershire Cricket Ground,’ says CUK Director of System Solution Sales, Mark Bromfield. ‘The ground needed a new PA system that covered all the seating areas, as well as the bars, food areas, car parks, practice nets and entrance areas. It also had to be installed at a high level due to flooding at the ground, which happens almost every year.
‘The ground supplied a document from the England and Wales Cricket Board (EBC) for cricket ground specification performance, which offered guidance on how to integrate the system in a way that respected the ground.’
After holding site meetings with the client and HTS, CUK Group set about specifying the best fit for both the ECB and WCCC’s requirements. ‘In order to produce Ease plots for every zone, we referred to architectural drawings of the different areas, which ensured that we achieved even coverage and SPL,’ Bromfield says. ‘We wanted a solution that looked and sounded great, so we chose Renkus-Heinz.’
One of the EBC specifications was for system redundancy, with WCCC also wanting control of each zone independently depending on the requirements of any specific event. This led to HTS installing 94 loudspeakers across the ground, comprising 51 Renkus-Heinz UBX4s, 20 UBX8s, eight Audac HS208T and 15 Audac WX502O to serve 31 zones.
‘Renkus-Heinz’s Passive UniBeam technology was a big reason why we opted for the UBX Series,’ Bromfield explains. ‘It offers products with asymmetrical dispersion and pan and tilt brackets – which was ideal for WCCC. This allowed us to mount the loudspeakers at the rear of the seating area to achieve even coverage from the seats right to the front row.’
Renkus-Heinz’s UBX Series incorporates beam-steering technology into a passive column using neodymium 3-inch drivers. The narrow cabinet footprint combined with Passive UniBeam coverage, allows surface mounting of the column using an included wall-mount bracket.
Passive UniBeam technology addresses each transducer with all-pass filter networks, gain shading and additional frequency filtering. This generates an asymmetrical vertical dispersion with constant directivity, ensuring front-to-back coverage with minimal side-lobe artifacts. The system at New Road is powered by eight Powersoft Unica-2K8 amplifiers and controlled via two Symetrix Radius NX 12X8s and one Symetrix T-10 Glass. The T-10 Glass allows the system to be switched to any zone for independent volume control, while also triggering messages and announcements, too. Additionally, a redundant network ensures that if any issues occur, one network will remain operational, and the speakers will continue to cover their specific zone.
‘It has given the ground even coverage and dispersion, and the fact that the loudspeakers are IP66-rated and use 100V taping made the installation even more seamless,’ Bromfield says of the new system. ‘The quality of the sound is amazing. I soon realised that a cricket pitch is a lot bigger than I once thought, so I ended up walking around it in circles to double check that everything was performing correctly. I was really impressed with the Renkus-Heinz system and what it has achieved. It was easy to set up and has given New Road a new lease of life.’
