With Barr Construction undertaking the building construction, it was left to turnstile and gate specialists, Swift Tate Security Technology Ltd, to offer a turnkey solution by specifying a fully-featured public address/voice alarm system. And with 23 years’ experience behind them they turned to TOA for the solution. The system is designed to provide both public address facilities and voice evacuation, integrated with the fire alarm system.
The installation features 21 of TOA’s new purpose-built ES-0871 stadium boxes in a distributed 100V line design, controlled from the SX-1000 Smart Matrix Control System. Eight enclosures are distributed into each of the two long East/West stands and five in the North stand behind the goal.Distributing sound evenly over a 90° x 60° dispersion pattern from a CD horn and 12in mid/LF, the loudspeakers are ideal for the application. The weatherproof ES-0871s come with a rotatable horn and at Bournemouth they are mounted horizontally to eliminate the risk of hotspotting, and to enhance speech delivery to all points of the stands. The speakers inside the bowl are powered by TOA DPA 1200 amplifiers, while in the perimeter concourse areas, executive boxes and bars are fed from TOA V Series amplification.
The SX-1200 mic and two 40U drive racks (containing the SX-1000 matrixing system) are located in the control room, which is used for announcements and police control. An input is linked to the fire alarm system, but on match days takes its feed from the DJ, when the ES-0871 shows itself more than capable of handling the music programme. Featuring emergency audio signal channels, the SX-1000 is ideal for both routing of simultaneous audio channels as well as speaker line failure detection circuitry and logging. It can be configured as a 128x128 I/O control device, with 128 x 128 control inputs. The 16 audio busses enable 16 simultaneous processing of up to 16 audio signals, while the software-driven operation makes complicated wiring set-ups unnecessary.
The entire system was designed and commissioned by TOA, who also built the two control racks, which went in to coincide with the first two stands being built. The installation has been designed to accommodate not only the current requirements, but has the facility to expand when the new South stand comes online. Explained TOA project manager, Ian Bridgewater: "We will then simply plug in a new rack and expansion cards and take the leads from the DSP matrix, which is reconfigurable."
(Lee Baldock)
