With summer temperatures hitting 40°C/104°F, the sound systems – along with the rest of the build and the audience – at the multi-purpose stadium in Al-Rayyan, Qatar and Al-Kharitiyath sports clubs and the near-identical Al-Gharafa stadium have to be resilient.
Together, they represent the latest in a series of high-profile Renkus-Heinz beam steering installations in the Middle East – two other recent prestigious projects being the Qatar Royal Mosque and the Dubai Swim Stadium. Both of the new soccer stadia are owned by the Qatar Olympic Committee and seat around 25,000. Both are largely open-air venues, apart from VIP grandstands.
When consultant Fredrik Setterberg of Swedish audio specialists Soliflex was called in the fine-tune the design, he realised this was a world first for the versatile IC Live system, which was installed in record time by local contractor Al-Tamas.
‘It was a very fast job from start to finish – about a month from the order being received,’ he reports. ‘We and Al-Tamas equipped two stadia with 16 IC Live arrays and two sub-woofers in each stadium, each connected via Rhaon (Renkus-Heinz Audio Operations Network). We originally planned to have the loudspeakers on the edge of the pitch shooting upwards towards the audience, but the QOC asked for a re-design, partly because of visibility issues. The main challenge was to massively improve intelligibility across the seating areas without interfering with sightlines – and without a roof to hang speakers from.’
Sound sources are mostly music, in the shape of national anthems, and spoken commentaries, announcing the names of goal scorers and the recipients of yellow cards, delivered by an announcer from a media booth in the grandstand using a wireless microphone. A 360 Systems hard-disk-based playout system provides the musical content, with a Yamaha mixer integrating the various sound sources. A MediaMatrix Nion NX handles distribution to the system’s 11 zones, which can be switched on and off independently, while all the speaker processing is performed within Rhaon.
The mixing console is a Midas Venice 160. The system will also have an analogue back-up via two Sonifex RB-DA6 distribution amplifiers.
‘The big advantage with Rhaon is that you don’t need an expensive DSP processor, because the only function it performs is the matrix zone routing,’ says Setterberg. ‘We use Rhaon for EQ and beam steering and everything else, and networking is all on fibre optic with Cat5 up to the loudspeakers, which are weatherized and are fitted with ruggedised Ethernet switches that will work at up to 85°C/185°F without fan cooling.’
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