At the races

When the Dubai Racing Club unveiled plans in March 2007 for a phenomenal new horse racing city called Meydan, it certainly captured the attention of the international horse racing community. The Arabic meaning of Meydan translates to a place where people congregate and race, but in terms of world class facilities and scale, this translation doesn’t really do it justice as it is purely in a class of its own.

Having provided the vision of this landmark development, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is now the proud host of this state-of-the-art 8.75 furlong Tapeta synthetic dirt and 12-furlong turf track. It’s a staggering achievement for all those contractors who were involved in the project. In the three years it has taken from conception to opening, what was once derelict land has given way to competing horses and jockeys cheered on by the spectators in a stunning 1km long Grandstand.

Undoubtedly the focal point for the entire development is the 60,000 capacity landmark grandstand, but Meydan also incorporates a 5-star hotel, the Meydan Museum, breeding facilities, six international restaurants, an IMAX cinema and covered spaces for 10,000 vehicles.

The design and master plan for Meydan was provided by the architects Teo A Khing (TAK). The Malaysian company has an office in Dubai and has won several awards and commendations while pioneering new developments in Asia and the Middle East over the past decade. ‘The design as you approach the track is of a falcon, which is a defining symbol of the local heritage, and denotes decisiveness and speed,’ explains TAK MD Teo A Khing. ‘The racing facilities are outstanding, but they’re not just for the season. We wanted to maximise entertainment all year round so Meydan can stage conferences, concerts, functions and conduct business through the off-season. It will be a tourist attraction as well as a business community.’ Together with their many sub-contractors, TAK turned what must have seemed like a distant dream into a reality, culminating in the hosting of the 2010 Dubai World Cup on 27 March.

Since their involvement in the Madinat project in 2003-04, A/V systems integrator Almoe AV Systems has continued to rise in stature in the UAE and, as such, TAK appointed them as the audio visual contractor for Meydan. In addition to installing the extensive BGM system, Almoe AV Systems were also contracted to integrate the broadcast and digital signage systems.

Working to designs provided by A/V consultant Mediatech Design Group, headed by Ged King, they were confronted by almost Herculean tasks. Providing some indication of the project’s scale, Almoe AV Systems oversaw the pulling of 186km of speaker cable together with 60km of data cabling for the EV Netmax and AMX control system and a further 18km of fibre optic cabling. The main race commentary, announcements and various BGM sources are routed to the 5,000 Evid ceiling speakers via a dual redundant Cobranet network and EV NetMax system. A Renkus-Heinz IC Live system is discretely installed into the Royal Enclosure, as the windows aren’t opened on race days providing local commentary reinforcement.

The Meydan hotel is located in the eastern wing of the Grandstand, for which each of the 279 rooms in this vast facade provides its guests with unobstructed views of the racecourse. The Almoe AV Systems team initially cut their teeth at Meydan on the hotel project, which project manager Zahid Mir likens to the baby brother of the Grandstand, although it swallowed some 60km of speaker fibre and data cable itself.

‘We had to strike a fine balance between the interior design and technical requirements,’ comments sales and design engineer Sanjay Kumar. TAK were uncompromising in their role as the interior designer and their brief was that the main public speaker systems had to be concealed, so as not to obstruct the eye from the attractive décor of the building. As such, a number of custom painted Axys Intellivox column speaker systems have been integrated carefully into the walls and behind facades and structures.

The intelligibility of the DS180 and DS480 speakers in such architecturally challenging areas, blessed with expanses of floor to ceiling glass and marble floors is extremely accurate with even dispersion, having had their beams steered away from harsh surfaces. The centre piece of the Hotel is the Ballroom and this versatile space can be manipulated to suit respective functions. The client’s brief here was to provide a seamless and flexible environment where the audio visual services would not be obtrusive to the lavish interior design. ‘Almoe AV Systems achieved this by using the latest technology and by furnishing the ballroom at both high and low levels with state of the art facilities,’ furthers Mr Kumar. ‘Litelab BusPort retractable ceiling mount technology has provided a fully flexible lighting platform, while Christie projectors, Drapers screens and an array of facility panels offering various inputs and outputs – such as fibre, DMX, VGA, Audio Data and Socapex – allow this space to be hired out for hosting press conferences, seminars and fashion shows.’

The main hotel control room is outfitted with a Soundcraft GB4 console, AMX control systems and racks housing the EV N8000 processors, Moxa switches and custom programmed music servers from specialist music content supplier Imagesound Arabia. ‘It was an extremely hard task but we thoroughly enjoyed the challenge,’ furthers Mr Mir.

The audio systems weren’t exclusive in being neatly obscured from view. Solar panels have been positioned onto the distinctive Crescent Roof atop the Grandstand, helping to meet approximately 20 per cent of the required energy needs of the Grandstand. Global solar energy service provider Suntech Power Holdings was commissioned to undertake the custom build, production and the installation of 4,840 1.1 x 1.1m solar panels.

Spanning a total surface area of 6,000 sq-m, the panels were then individually integrated and installed directly into the cantilevered roof’s skin to comply with the aesthetic vision of TAK. The 750kW energy output system is the largest solar array to be connected to DEWA’s grid in the UAE, for which a monitoring system continuously measures the power output of the solar array, in addition to wind speed, temperature and IR radiation levels.

Having cut their teeth on the hotel project, the Almoe AV Systems team then had to absorb themselves into the Grandstand project, which in comparison would send most A/V installers into a state of melancholia. ‘As with all broadcast systems, redundancy was a huge issue for the Grandstand,’ explains

Mr King. The various BGM sources, commentaries and announcements are routed to some 5,000 Evid ceiling speakers – predominantly 4.2T models – via an enormous dual redundant Cobranet network and EV Netmax system. ‘An independent cabling infrastructure was required that would offer dual redundancy for sports broadcasting, as dual redundancy wasn’t possible with the Grandstand’s shared conduits.’

Having identified the fact that the Grandstand would largely be unused outside the racing season from April to October, Mr King realised that the Electrical Low Voltage (ELV) rooms would not be treated to the luxury of air conditioning at the time of year in Dubai when the thermometer can sometimes hit 50°C with high humidity to boot. ‘I decided that the Ethernet switches for the Netmax system were crucial if they were to survive the summer conditions and therefore I recommended Moxa PT-7728 modular switches.’

The integration of this fast Fibre/Ethernet backbone comes with a redundant ring and 110/220 VDC/VAC dual isolated redundant power supplies, and importantly it also provides greater flexibility resulting in simpler network planning. ‘By implementing the Moxa switches, we condensed the number of ELV rooms down from 64 to 22, and this ultimately saved us all a lot of time and budget.’

The EV Netmax N8000 is a digital audio system controller, which was selected because of its flexible modular hardware design. Four slots with 8-channel audio modules cater to a maximum of 32 local audio channels, for which each slot can be equipped either with an audio input module or an audio output module.

Each of the 22 ELV rooms contains two N8000 processors – one of which is for redundancy – which are each configured and controlled via the EV IRIS-Net software. Additionally, the N8000 communicates through the integrated CAN bus installed in the rack mounted EV CPS 8.5 8-channel amplifiers.

To compensate for the lack of air conditioning, each of the Almoe AV Systems racks have had industrial fans inserted into the top of them. The wiring performed in each rack is perfection, for which all inputs and outputs are clearly identified by a numbered index system, which corresponds at the speaker termination. Each rack was built off site in Almoe’s bespoke rack-building facility headed by Mohammed ‘Slim’ Chaudhery, thus saving more time on site, scaling down the task in each ELV room to testing the CobraNet fibres and completing the speaker terminations to the amplifiers. Of the 60 Almoe AV Systems technicians and engineers on site, approximately one third of them worked on the PA BGM system.

The focal point of the Meydan project is without doubt, the giant 108 x 10.8m Mitsubishi Diamond Vision LED screen which faces the grandstand opposite the Royal Enclosure. The screen arrived in sections on pallets from Japan, having been individually pre-built and containerised. They were then assembled onto the concrete plinth and it is now driven by a Christie X20 Spyder, which pixel maps to the LED canvas.

A speaker system was required for announcements and commentaries for trackside spectators in addition to those in the Grandstand seats. Initially, Mediatech suggested a series of small column speakers to be fixed to the outer railings, but this was dismissed for aesthetic reasons. ‘TAK understandably didn’t want the racing track to be visually obscured in any way,’ explains Mr King. Following a series of meetings, the LED screen emerged as the preferred location of the speaker system, but given the 171m distance to the furthest seats in the Grandstand, a conventional line array solution was dismissed.

‘In the early design stages we had commissioned Steve Jones of UK audio consultants SJA to provide a feasibility report on the use of a central cluster approach,’ confirms Mr King. ‘Steve’s experience of working on the Ascot sound system and the studies they had carried out in assessing the likely noise levels at the finishing line were indispensable.

The real challenge was to be able to produce 100+dB in the grandstand at 120m distance, but at the same time keep the sound levels on the track at 30m above the horses’ heads below 100dB as they raced towards the finishing line. Only one speaker in the world could provide the levels we needed and accurate coverage over this sort of distance and that is the Meyer Sound SB-1,’ confirms Mr King.

The parabolic dish has been successfully employed in applications where a high-frequency fill with high SPLs over distances over more than 100m is required. The parabolic sound beam can propagate sound waves that decrease just 3dB SPL per doubling of distance for more than 100m, across a five-octave frequency range, with a consistent and narrow beam width. By using the directional behaviour of a parabolic reflecting surface, the SB-1 accurately focuses high-frequency fill energy over great distances from a pointsource system without the use of delayed fill loudspeakers.

The consistent 10° beam width at 30m also provides ultra-precise coverage control. ‘During testing, I could hear the sound level dramatically drop immediately by moving 2m in the Grandstand – they were like spotlights. Meyer Sound has a great track record when it comes to sporting venues and they were really helpful in supplying us with coverage pattern models and mounting configurations.’

The SB-1 consists of a fibre glass parabolic reflector dish with a bulletshaped pod containing a 4-inch compression driver and an aspherical horn, mounted at the focus of the parabolic surface and aimed at the centre of the dish. A 12-inch bandlimited cone driver is embedded inside the centre of the dish facing the pod to steer and focus the sound produced from the horn. Mounted in a companion yoke, the dish housing serves as the parabolic aiming mechanism and contains the amplification, signal processing and control electronics for both drivers.

Application engineer Brian Bolly of Meyer Sound worked closely with the Mediatech team during the proof of concept stage and flew in a pair of SB-1 units, allowing them to demonstrate the system by directing the beams into the Grandstand from a temporary scaffold tower. ‘There were several main challenges for us to overcome, but obviously the distance needed to project sound from the temporary speaker towers over the all-weather and turf tracks to the grandstand seating areas was the biggest,’ furthers Almoe AV Systems division manager Dave McMahon. ‘It’s 120m to the front edge of the audience and there is a delay of over 400ms, which is quite substantial. However, the SB-1 performed superbly.’

The initial design presented by Meyer Sound’s design services team placed the 32 SB-1’s in a line array along the top of the Mitsubishi LED screen into all the seating areas, but TAK quite rightly ruled this out citing that the outer perimeter of the race tracks would be obscured if the 1.8m circumference speakers were positioned in such a manner.

Returning from the drawing board, Mediatech succeeded in convincing TAK that accurate intelligibility could be achieved by constructing four custom designed PA towers at either end of the screen. Each of the 17m high towers, designed by Mediatech, are subdivided into five levels. The lower four levels consist of two SB-1 speakers on each with an upper level containing two Meyer Sound MSL-6 speakers.

The allhorn speakers contain two 12-inch low frequency cone drivers and three high frequency compression drivers in a trapezoidal cabinet with integral electronics. Providing a 30° horizontal x 25° vertical coverage pattern, two MSL-6 speakers have been combined with eight SB-1’s in each tower to extend the low frequency range down to 65Hz ±4dB. Owing to these last minute changes, the run up to the World Cup on 27 March was a nail biting experience for Meyer Sound, Mediatech and Almoe AV Systems.

As such, the speakers only arrived on 10 March, for which two specially chartered flights from the US were flown to Dubai in order to deliver this unique PA system on site. The high-frequency pods of the SB-1 were disassembled and packed for shipping inside the dish, thus preventing damage during shipment.

The speakers were all weather protected to IP65 standards ensuring they could withstand the harsh Tropic of Cancer elements. Once on site, each SB-1 speaker was fixed into position on the custom towers, via an articulated mounting yoke. They were then individually configured and aimed with a laser scope, before being time-aligned prior to commissioning.

Loudspeaker management is performed by four Meyer Sound Galileo 616 processors. ‘Given the extreme throw distances and the restrictions placed on us with respect to the mounting locations, the performance of the Meyer system exceeded everyone’s expectations, delivering ample sound pressure levels, great intelligibility and a real presence for the commentators voice,’ summarises Mr Mir.

The unique throw capability of the SB-1/MSL-6 system has created a point-source reinforcement without delay loudspeakers, which is perhaps a first for Meyer Sound. ‘Santana and Elton John played a concert here for the World Cup using a very good line array system,’ furthers Mr King. ‘However, given the distance from the stage by the scoreboard to most of the seats in the Grandstand, it really didn’t have the throw capabilities of the SB-1. The SB-1 in comparison sliced through it – you cannot compare it to anything else out there.’ Meyer Sound’s design consultant Dave Dennison adds: ‘The SB-1 sound beams are extraordinary for their power and precision in long throw situations and naturally we are proud to have been part of this incredible project.’

‘This project has been amazing,’ concludes Mr Mir. ‘I arrived on site from the UK in February 2009, looked around, and laughed when asked if we could complete in 13 months time. But looking at it now, it goes to show that anything is possible in this country if someone has the vision and the will. I have never worked on such a complex project where there was absolutely no compromise on the design, and no compromise on the timescale, but it absolutely works.’

www.meydan.ae

www.almoe.com

www.tak.com.my

www.mediatech.ae

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