The Olympic Stadium of the City of Antwerp got an overhaul to its sound system. The complex was built as the main location of the Summer Olympics of 1920, a hundred years ago and is still a landmark today serving as the home base for football team K.Beerschot V.A. 

A Compact dispersive system vs Big cluster concepts.

In the marquise above the seating areas around the football field a total of 41 weather-proof Martin Audio speakers were placed to have an optimal dispersion of sound. With their compact and discrete design, they guarantee that every visitor experiences the game with great audio quality but also maintains a perfect line of sight. Because of the short distance between the speakers and the seats it’s possible to mount a significantly lighter system, putting less pressure on the roof structure.

25 CDD15-WR and 16 x CDD 10-WR speakers, placed with the right delay settings offer the perfect flexibility in an adjustable setup for the different types of tribunes and seating areas. Both speech and energizing Jock Jams can now be used to the fullest to set the right ambiance for the visitors and football team to perform at their best.  

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Valentijn Damman of PFL remarks how well the dispersion of the CDD is working, even in stadium. “At every seat you have the same volume and tonal balance, a great feeling when you do a walk with the client when commissioning the project! It’s not only working great when you do the design, but even more in practice! And we could do it with half of the speakers compared to before!”

Aside from the obvious use of amplified sound in a sports stadium, this system is also advanced in security support for crowd control and public addressing applications because of its easy-to-use zoning capabilities via the pre-programmed TCP1 touchscreens that communicates with the Dynacord MXE5 Matrix processor.

To be prepared for special events an external connection port with a Radial Engineering interface is installed near the field to be able to plug analog signals into the Dante network and use the main sound system without any hassle.  

The complete system runs on three Powersoft Quattrocanali 8804 amplifiers and one Dynacord MXE5 Matrix processor.  Steven Kemland from FACE PROJECTS concludes: “We’ve been using Powersoft for a long time already and we love it, but in this project it was absolute strange to replace a complete 42 Unit rack filled with 20 years old amplifiers by just 3 Units … and still have the 12 zones in the stadium with a total power of 20.000 Watt.”

Technical design was done by FACE PROJECTS on behalf of PFL. Both teams worked together on installing the new setup. Support and maintenance will be followed up by PFL. 

From PFL and FACE PROJECTS we wish K. Beerschot V.A. the best of luck in Belgium’s First Division A, known as the Jupiler Pro League. We hope they can perform again soon for a full stadium with the maximum capacity of supporters enjoying the sports spectacle.