The British Standards Institution has launched the revised BS7827, a code of practice for audio systems designers in sports venues.

BS7827 – officially known as a Code of practice for designing, specifying, maintaining and operating emergency sound systems at sports venues – was initially drawn up in the wake of the Hillsborough fotball stadium disaster in 1989, and covers not only stadia, but any venue where sport is played such as racecourses and swimming pools. It is also applicable to large public facilities such as shopping malls, conference and exhibition centres.

‘The origins of this standard are a code of practice produced by a working group within the Sound Communications Industries Federation, which I chaired back in 1989 after the Hillsborough disaster,’ says Steve Jones, a Consulting Engineer specialising in sound and Chairman of the EPL 100-2 Working Group at BSI, who produced the revised standard. ‘It was then taken into the British Standards and became BS7827 in 1996. Four years ago we had a meeting of the EPL 100 Group, and decided to revise that standard, and I was appointed chairman of the revision panel. Our first meeting was in January 2008, and now three-and-a-half years later, we have published the revised standard.’

The new revision, BS7827:2011, was formally concluded on the Tannoy/Lab.gruppen stand at Plasa 2011, which provided the setting to put forward this new code of practice to the pro audio industry. ‘This is a code of practice; a guide as to what to think about when you are designing a system right through to commissioning a system, and also the part in the middle, which is the electro-acoustic design and the system design and so on,’ Jones says. ‘We’re hoping that some of the good work that we have put into this standard will go into EN54 part 32, which is being written at the moment by the European Working Group 3, and that will effectively be a performance standard for voice alarm systems.’

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