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| Sound reinforcement in the main hall is provided by twenty six flown Electro-Voice Sx600PIX enclosures |
The SCHARRena in the Ban Cannstatt suburb of Stuttgart is the latest addition to the Neckarpark events complex surrounding the Mercedes-Benz Arena. Since mid 2011, the 7,900-square-metre hall capable of seating up to 2,000 spectators has been the venue for a wide variety of sports, including volleyball and handball at Bundesliga level as well as fencing, judo, gymnastics and dance.
To ensure the new sports hall met the highest standards in terms of sound quality and safety, the SCHARRena's management entrusted the task of installing the distributed sound and voice-alarm systems to the Stuttgart-based firm of Lindenmeyer GmbH. "Our task was to design and install first of all a voice-alarm system complying with the EN standard and then a distributed sound system for music, commentary and announcements," explains Roland Kruck, the responsible sound engineer with Lindenmeyer GmbH. "The greatest challenge here was posed by the reverberation time, which is always problematic in concrete halls and makes obtaining good sound quality a far from easy matter. A further problem was the wide fluctuation in the numbers of spectators expected at the various events, which hardly made our job any easier."
Against this background, the teams from Lindenmeyer GmbH and Prinzing Elektrotechnik decided – after conducting extensive simulations and measurements – on a five-zone solution involving a large number of loudspeakers. This concept enables the sound pressure levels in different parts of the SCHARRena to adjust to the number and distribution of the spectators present.
A central role in the sound distribution solution is played by systems from Electro-Voice and DYNACORD. In the entry hall, VIP areas, changing rooms and training hall, DYNACORD loudspeakers are used. The Stuttgart-based specialists Prinzing Elektrotechnik installed, in all, one hundred and seventy-two DYNACORD DL 96 A ceiling loudspeakers, twenty DYNACORD WL 90 wall loudspeakers, twenty Bosch LBC 3090/01 ceiling loudspeakers and fourteen DYNACORD DL 800/10T pressure chamber loudspeakers at carefully chosen locations within the complex.
Sound reinforcement in the main hall is provided by twenty-six flown Electro-Voice Sx600PIX enclosures, which feature internally mounted 600-watt line transformers. To ensure the highest possible level of intelligibility throughout the hall, the team installed the compact 3-way full-range loudspeakers in as close proximity as possible to the seating areas to be covered. All the loudspeakers are driven by DYNACORD power amplifiers, to wit: fourteen DPA 8150, one DPA 8225 and one DSA 8206 power amplifier with an integrated RCM-810 module.
"In combination with the DYNACORD amplifiers, the Sx6000PIX enclosures deliver crystal-clear reproduction of the spoken word with just the right amount of sound pressure," says Albert Lindenmeyer, Managing Director of Lindenmeyer GmbH. The zoning concept, as the first series of events has demonstrated, was entirely the right one. "We can provide coverage to the entire SCHARRena or else simply to specific areas as the situation demands," says Kruck. "In this way, we have managed to reduce sound reflections and disturbing reverberative sound to a minimum and done so in a highly efficient way."
The mixing of signals and the control of the system are also handled by systems from DYNACORD. In the control room at the eastern end of the arena, a DYNACORD CMS 1000-3 mixing console gathers all the incoming signals, whether from CD or DVD players or the various Electro-Voice microphones used. A mobile media wagon equipped with a further DYNACORD CMS 1000-3 compact mixer and a variety of Electro-Voice wireless-microphone receivers and multi-players is connected to the system via CobraNet.
A ZX1-90 monitor in the control room adds a pre-listening option. The system is controlled with the aid of a DYNACORD D64 digital audio matrix manager. Thanks to IRIS-Net software, the entire installation can be configured, supervised and controlled centrally via a unified user interface. The heart of the EVAC system, which meets the highest safety standards, is a DYNACORD PROMATRIX 8016 digital matrix manager with three DYNACORD DPC 8015 basic paging stations. In case of emergency, any music playing is instantly muted and the voice-alarm system takes over automatically.
