Stadium Australia

Colonial
Stadium

New South Wales
Tennis Centre

Dunc Grey Velodrome

Sydney Cricket Ground

Suncorp Stadium

Stadium Australia

Stadium Australia represents the state of the art in large venue sound reinforcement.

The combination of its unique architecture and extensive acoustic modeling have ensured that attending an event is both a visual and an aural pleasure.

The P.A. people teamed up with its own Creative Audio engineering division and Bose Australia to deliver the best in sound system design.

Below is a brief description of each of the elements of the P.A. System.

FOH Speaker System

The system is primarily designed to reinforce events with a centre field focus. Highest intelligibility sound is provided to patrons seated in the east and west stands, particularly for events with an audio source centred on the half way line of field.

As a consequence of this design philosophy, the system is able to provide the highest level sound reinforcement for events of this nature with only a little requirement for external equipment.

The system for the East and West grandstands consists of 16 high powered high directivity clusters located eight on the leading edge of each stand. Each cluster comprises three mid-high cabinets and four bass cabinets in a cardioid array. Twelve additional clusters are located five in each roof structure to provide additional coverage to acoustically shadowed areas. The rear areas of the lower seating tier is covered by 56 cabinets under level three.

The system can also be reconfigured to provide support for sound reinforcement for events where the audio focus in one of the end zones. Each cluster is capable of being individually delayed to create an audio focus wherever the client desires.

The system for the north and south temporary grandstands consists of high powered high directivity clusters located on the lighting towers to each side of the stand. Each tower cluster comprises 14 speaker cabinets - four mid-high cabinets at the upper level, two mid-high cabinets at the lower level and eight bass cabinets in a directional column array. The rear areas of the lower seating tier are covered by 32 additional cabinets under Level 3.

As with the east and west stands, each cluster is controllable in terms of signal and delay. The use of the end zone systems in concert applications may require special consideration with relation to conflicts arising from signal arriving from a number of sources.

BOH Speaker System

There are 1,600 back of house speakers grouped into 32 logical zones. Each zone consists of a number of cable home runs and one or more amplifier channels. Amplifier channels can be reallocated to one of up to 32 logical zones.

Performance Audio System

The System is optimised for sporting style events of the highest level. It has comprehensive replay facilities from a number of media, and a mid level 24ch mixer equipped with eight stereo inputs. Outboard insertable compression and effects units, and four UHF radio microphones complete the package.

Control System

The Stadium is equipped with a comprehensive control system enabling control of a significant number of system components along with a paging system throughout the public and back of house areas.

The control system comprises a number of networked PC's with a mixture of commercially available and custom software. Functions include control of all delay times, equalisation, level setting, background music and paging configuration, error detection and logging, etc.

Each logical zone or area can be individually paged and be supplied with a specialist background music feed. There are spare inputs and outputs available. The system is fully software configurable, allowing customisation for special events should this be required. The system also supports the manual or scheduled playback of pre recorded messages.

Crowd Monitoring System

A stereo Crowd Monitoring System has been implemented utilising eight crowd monitoring microphones fed into a DSP based mixer. The outputs are then amplified and split to various locations using distribution amplifiers.

Tie Lines

There are extensive tie line facilities at several locations around and on the playing surface, including the four player races, as well as field pits at the centre, southern and northern ends, and the western side. Each location includes 12 microphone lines on a multipin connector, and six audio tie lines.

There are also tie lines to the OB Van Room and CTER (Level 0), the Press Box (Level 2 West), the Media Rooms on Level 3 West and the four Amplifier Rooms.

All lines are terminated in the Sound Control Room on Level 5 West.