Competitions took place across a number of different venues, some permanent, some temporary, some large, some small. Specialist audio supplier, Dimension, and Sports Technology director Damian Rowe had the challenging task of supplying audio systems for the competition venues throughout the games, and for the many corporate and press facilities that required a pro audio presence.
Rowe is no stranger to events of this magnitude; a veteran of the Sochi Winter Olympics, London 2012 and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, his CV is something of a gold standard. "Across the 21 venues, over half were rigged with d&b audiotechnik loudspeakers as their primary systems. Wherever possible, we always choose d&b for this type of job for one very simple reason: they are the best product available. The combination of power, processing and control you get from the wide range of systems is unsurpassed."
Project manager Mike Sumner was head of audio for Glasgow and Baku, and worked alongside Sports Technology in Sochi and London. "It's probably easier to say which d&b systems we didn't use rather than the ones we did. T10s were the perfect choice for the Basketball Arena that had a capacity of two and a half thousand, while the nearly four thousand seater Beach Arena, that hosted beach volleyball and beach soccer, was rigged with V-Series.
"In other venues we made use of Q7s, B4s and M4s for example. No matter which product is chosen from the range, be it new or old, d&b reliability and quality of sound reinforcement is a given. The value of that is hard to quantify, especially when you are working so far away from home.
"In the Crystal Hall indoor arena, originally built for the Eurovision Song Contest, there were three venues. In the boxing venue, we used an almost identical T10 system to the one that was in both the Excel Centre for London 2012 and the SECC for the Glasgow games, a solid endorsement of that loudspeaker as one could get."
However, in the Crystal Hall venue for fencing, karate and taekwondo, Sumner tried something new. The Y10P loudspeakers were used as a stand-alone point source system as there was no means of flying an array. This was something of a difficult space that was changed around dependent on which sport was being played. "I'd never used them before; they were light and easy to rig."
(Jim Evans)
