An agreement made with the AS Roma soccer club has seen Italian FM broadcaster Radio Italia made an official partner of the club, in line with similar agreements with Inter Milan and Italy’s national soccer team. Following the deal, the radio station has acquired 72 Outline Mantas speaker systems for pre-match entertainment at the clubs home ground, the Olimpico Stadium.

The loudspeaker set-up comprises 13 stacks, 11 of which have six Mantas vertical line array elements, an Outline DBS18-2 sub and a rack with two of the company’s T5 power amps, while the other two stacks have three Mantas and a single sub.

Installed round the perimeter of the pitch prior to matches, four large stacks are placed in front of each of the two main stands, two cover each of the curves (north and south), and one of the small stacks sits mid-way between them, to complement the pitch’s two huge video screens.

With the exception of the curves’ speakers, occasionally moved to meet specific events’ requirements (such as for rugby matches, which have a slightly larger pitch), the rig, manned by distributor and technical service company Mods Art of Chieti, is almost always the same.

‘As well as supplying the sound reinforcement used for entertainment before matches, which features an all-Italian playlist and the teams’ anthems, we are responsible for all the artistic aspects of pre-game activity,’ says Radio Italia’s Matteo Celentano.

Celentano worked on the system’s design and installation with Outline technical support specialist Francesco Ferretti: ‘We’ve had a very satisfactorily working relationship with Outline for several years, already used several Mantas systems, as well as the manufacturer’s Hard monitors in our Cologno Monzese auditorium,’ he says.

The 70,634-seat  Olimpico is Italy’s second largest soccer stadium, so to ensure optimum results, the Mods Art team imported a 3D design of the arena into Outline’s Open Array software and ran a series of tests to find the most suitable configuration and ensure compliance with management restrictions on enclosure positioning, to safeguard spectators’ sightlines.

‘The software is extremely accurate, so after finding the best configuration, we just had to put it into practice,’ says Mods Art’s Luigi Lombardi

As well as music and comments by the MC (Roma’s official speaker, Matteo Vespasiani, also host of the club’s own FM radio channel), the Outline system supports the audio of all the video content screened at the stadium.

Explaining that Radio Italia always wants its music to be heard well by listeners, Celentano concludes: ‘We’re very satisfied with the results achieved – timbre and intelligibility are better than other systems I’ve heard at the venue.’