Recently the venue underwent a complete refurbishment, and DM Audio, which has a long association with the entire Globe complex (including the Annex and Hovet) was awarded the contract to upgrade the audio infrastructure.
DM Audio's Lars Wern has been using QSC Audio's RAVE DSP signal transport platform almost since its inception - most notably at the Y2000 Eurovision Song Contest at the Globe, and the company subsequently carried out a major installation within the 85m high venue.
At the Hovet Icehockey Arena, DM Audio's Jan Petersson designed the sound system in stereo - in order to achieve both a better and broader sound image and also for back-up and redundancy purposes.
Two RAVE 522aa's, working on QSControl.net (QSC's new generation network audio system) are identically configured, with a matrix mixer, EQ, delay and limiter assigned to each pair of loudspeakers.
The Omni inputs (six discrete inputs for TTL logic, voltage control or passive resistance) are used in logic mode in order to select one of eight snapshots which will mute different loudspeakers depending on circumstance.
The clusters themselves comprise QSC Audio HPR153i (15" 3-way) enclosures for upthrow and HPR152i (15" 2-way) - operating respectively for left and right channel. A total of 11 of each loudspeaker are deployed to cover the North, South and East stands, while a further pair of HPR152i's are suspended over the ice rink.
"Because of the wide dispersion - 90° horizontally - we achieve quite an overlap between the clusters, which in turn provides for stereo sound to almost every seat," says Lars Wern. "This is equally important for back-up because we have two separate signal feeds from the mixer to the two RAVE 522aa devices and then to all the loudspeakers.
"In other words, if either the left or right mixer output channels, the patch field, one of the RAVE 522aa's or any of the loudspeakers should fail we would still have sound passing through the remaining loudspeakers."
(Jim Evans)
