d&b used for Baku venues

AZERBAIJAN: More than half of the 21 venues used for this summer's European Games in Baku called on d&b audiotechnik sound systems. Specialist audio supplier, Dimension, and Sports Technology director, Damian Rowe had the task of supplying audio systems for the competition venues as well as many corporate and press facilities.

'Wherever possible, we always choose d&b for this type of job for one very simple reason: they are the best product available,' said Mr Rowe. 'The combination of power, processing and control you get from the wide range of systems is unsurpassed.'

'It's probably easier to say which d&b systems we didn't use rather than the ones we did,' added project manager and head of audio, Mike Sumner. 'T10s were the perfect choice for the Basketball Arena that had a capacity of 2,500, while the nearly 4,000-seat 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,' he continued. '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, as solid an endorsement of that loudspeaker as one could get.'

However, in the Crystal Hall venue for fencing, karate and taekwondo, Mr 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. 'I'd never used them before; they were light and easy to rig and performed exceptionally well, giving a really warm feel in the low to mid-range.'

The manufacturer's ArrayCalc also proved to be a useful tool for Mr Sumner. 'I use ArrayCalc throughout the planning process and then once we're onsite it plays an invaluable role,' he explained. 'With events of this nature, we visit the venues and measure the rooms that are then built into ArrayCalc. But, of course, it's not unusual to find that the venues are not completed in time or when we arrive onsite the spaces have been altered significantly. With ArrayCalc we can pitch up and make the necessary changes without it becoming a time consuming or logistical nightmare. I wouldn't leave home without it. Even when we are using loudspeakers from another manufacturer, that doesn't offer a calculation program, I would still refer to ArrayCalc to offer a ballpark solution. The fact that it's free and available to everyone is amazing.'

Reflecting on the project, Mr Sumner is full of praise for d&b. 'There are many reasons that I would always be happy using a d&b system at an event such as this; not least that they perform so well. There is always a speaker in the d&b range that will fit the job perfectly and the fact everything is so interchangeable means that, across 20 odd venues, we were able to provide the right solution in the right place. In an environment where help can be hard to come by easily, a choice of d&b loudspeakers is something of a ?get out of jail? card for me.'

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