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Antwerp Sports Palace, "Sportpaleis" - Difficult Arena Acoustics
On Sunday, September 24, a major Belgian healthcare organization, "Ziekenzorg" threw a 50th anniversary party for its members and staff at the Antwerp Sports Palace or "Sportpaleis" - the city's veteran, 15,000-seat arena. Stage Unit Belgium was awarded the formidable task of providing the Meyer Sound loudspeaker system together with a full lighting rig for this prestigious event. The Sports Palace is known to be a sonically difficult venue, being highly reverberant. And, though recently renovated, the improvements had little or no impact on the acoustics. The hall is quite old and has a permanent cycle track running around its central periphery that only adds to the problems. For this event, the audio reinforcement system needed to accommodate a 75-piece orchestra and a large number of speeches. To ensure that the organizer's goals of excellent speech intelligibility were met, a central loudspeaker cluster comprised of some 22 Meyer Sound Self-Powered loudspeaker systems, augmented by two smaller delay clusters, was chosen. "The most important thing for our client was speech intelligibility," said Toon Van der Veken, the Technical Director from Stage Unit. "Together with 'very Meyer experienced' Sound Engineer Mark Luyckx & System Engineer, Bert Van Roy, we decided to use one mono-cluster of 22 MSL-4's, two delay clusters consisting of 8 MSL-4's, and 2 UPA-1P's, each, and a subwoofer system on the ground comprising 8 650-Ps. This was a first-time set-up in the Sportpaleis, and the arrangement worked amazing well. Even during system equalization everybody was impressed by the clarity and remarkable uniformity in sound coverage together with a very natural orientation on the stage at all times." From all positions in the hall, speech intelligibility was reported to be excellent. Praise for the sound was heard from around the room, and the evening was deemed an absolute success. Following such rave reviews, Stage Unit has already been contacted to provide service for a number of upcoming Sportpaleis events. October, 2000 |
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