A long-term AV supplier was tasked with updating the PA/VA at one of the noisiest football stadiums in the UK. Paul Milligan got a tour of Elland Road to see how it was done.
Leeds United has a long and proud history in English football. Formed in 1919 in Yorkshire, in the north of England, the club has been champions of England three times and runner-up a further five times. Like all football clubs, Leeds United’s fortunes have fluctuated over recent years, but one constant since 1919 has been the Elland Road Stadium. It is home to some of the most passionate supporters in England, and the ground has a reputation as one of the most atmospheric places to watch football in the UK.
However, like many older football grounds, different parts of the stadium have been updated at different times, so there is little uniformity. The seating capacity of Elland Road is currently 37,392, split (unevenly) between four stands. Which makes the job of delivering a stadium-wide PA/VA project so tricky.
This is where long-term AV supplier, Imperium Integration, comes in, Alan Inkster, managing director, takes up the story. “We started working with Leeds United back in the late 1990s to install a voice alarm system and it’s grown since then. It’s a stadium you really need to know, for someone coming in cold you’re not going to get it because every stand is disparate. The way every stand has been built is different. On top of that the access routes between them differ. If you go from the South Stand to the East Stand there’s a tunnel under the ground, you can walk through. If you’re going the East Stand to the North Stand you have to go on the roof, it’s all different and finding that and understanding that takes years of knowledge.”
What was the genesis of this particular project? “Leeds United as a club is very much about the match day experience. When you come to a game it’s focused on
the people who come and that extends to the safety side, because you got nearly 40,000 people you have to get out very quickly from a very old stadium, which is having good matchday control and about how well the voice alarm works.”
It’s been a long process to get to this point admits Inkster, but having that time paid off as new products came to light in that period that made it into the final project. “We were talking about it for 3.5 years, but the EN54 solution came out during that time. We were thinking what can we put in here that’s going to sound great, but complies to EN54? We were struggling because we won’t put a non-compliant system in.”
Leeds United has an aspiration as a club for a certain level of quality says Inkster. “They’re looking for a system that makes people go “wow, the music was fabulous”, or it was a great match day experience, but they know first and foremost it has to be able to evacuate, it has to be intelligible and audible, that’s the precursor for everything. They wanted rock concert quality for when it’s playing music, they wanted it crisp, intelligible and audible for safety announcements, but it has to be safe and EN54 compliant.”
The design process defined what EN54 system they were going to use in the end result says Inkster. “We chose MediaMatrix because it’s established, it’s proven, it’s at Wembley Stadium and the Amsterdam Arena, it’s all over the world. Everything is point to point to point, the routing and the level of control you get from that system is unparalleled, and it’s EN54, which is a big bonus. If we didn’t have to put EN54 (systems) in here, we’d have put MediaMatrix in anyway.”
The system installed by Imperium includes 18 Martin Audio T1230 Torus arrays in the North Stand, 18 in the South Stand, 24 in the West Stand, 30 in the East Stand, with an addition 12 in the corners of the stadium. A further 10 Martin Audio CDD 12 loudspeakers have been fitted at the rear of the West Stand to provide total coverage. Martin Audio SXCF118 subwoofers complement the loudspeakers, three each in the North and South Stands, four in the West Stand and six in the East. One Martin Audio CDD Live 12 loudspeaker has been installed in Yeboah’s Crossbar, a hospitality area found opposite the East Stand. Eight Martin Audio CDD 5 loudspeakers have also been installed with the LUTV production studio housed within the South Stand. Ceiling loudspeakers throughout all the stands are handled by 180 Bosch EN54 models, with 50 RCF ceiling loudspeakers in the South Stand concourses and other areas.
The loudspeaker line-up is completed by 40 Optimal Audio Cuboid 6 models in 40 different banqueting suites and other areas, as well as a further 20 Optimal Audio Cuboid 5 models fitted around the ground. Imperium has installed two MediaMatrix NION n3 Dante DSPs in the West Stand, with four installed in the East Stand. They are joined by one MediaMatrix nCIE Pilot monitoring servers in both of those stands. The LUTV production studio is also home to a MediaMatrix sDAB 16i networked audio bridge, and there is also an sDAB 8x81 audio bridge in the East Stand reception area.
Amplification throughout is provided by a mixture of Powersoft Ottocanali 4K, 8K and 12K DSPs. Two Powersoft Unica amps and a Mezzo 604 amp can be found in the Pavillion Banqueting Hall and East Stand Banqueting area respectively. Control for the system is all managed centrally. The sound installed by Imperium doesn’t end around the pitch though says Inkster, “Each corporate box has its own sound system, which used to be totally separate. Now we override it with the MediaMatrix, so we can control it and either use them to give better sound, or to mute the sound entirely.”
Imperium has also put extra feeds intoMediaMatrix to distribute the same audio feeds in the corporate boxes into the concourse areas. Football clubs are now having to behave like broadcasters in their own right, and Leeds United is no different. On a matchday in the LUTV room a director will sit in a control room from midday (for a 3pm kick off) and be able to communicate with a presenter and producer in the studio, and a cameraman in the tunnel. All LUTV feeds can be put into the main system via Dante. The broadcast tech doesn’t stop there, new studios have been built for broadcasters Sky Sports and Amazon Prime in the last two years. “There are two speakers in every room, these are soundproof rooms (to cut down on outside noise) and you can’t hear anything.
To feed in crowd noise we have mics on the roof play that sound through a separate system that you can turn on or off depending on if someone is using the rooms or not,” explains Inkster. What were the most difficult parts of the installation for Imperium on this project? The safety manager, Vince Merriman, was insistent he didn’t want cherry pickers inside the stands says Inkster. “His prime driver was health and safety and ease of maintenance. Cherry pickers are dangerous, expensive and damage
the pitch.” So Imperium had to come up with a solution that would allow them to change speakers if one was go down, without it impacting on health and safety around the ground. “Lots of people fly speakers but not permanently, it’s usually for a week and generally they’re not over the top of people either, which when you look at like the edge of some of the stands, they’re suspended above the pitch,” explains Inkster.
The solution was to build a bespoke series of winches to manoeuvre the speakers up (and down) in position. “Everything is doubled up, in some of the stands there’s two cables, and there’s a safety strap on one of those cables, so that if it one fails it just hangs there. We looked at lots of different ways of doing it. We initially looked at putting it onto selfwinding reels, but the inductance of that was the same as putting another 20 speakers on the end. We then started looking at cranes and what we could do with them. We hang the cable so that when you drop it further down, it pulls it up, that’s where the solution came from.
"It’s a great idea until you realise that every single bit of the West Stand and the South Stand are different, with many different angles to deal with, and there’s a big pipe going down the middle of one of them. The idea originally was to manufacture it off-site and fit it, but it was too difficult to do that. We eventually had to manufacture everything specifically for each individual drop, which was really tough.”
Because the PA/VA system is sending messages to nearly 40,000 people on a matchday, safety is the top priority, and the time (and care) it takes to install a new system means you can’t just switch from one PA/VA to another in one single day. Imperium had to keep the old system running alongside while the new one was being installed. “That’s the hardest thing about doing a project that takes two years. You have to keep the stadium running with two systems,” says Inkster.
Because the stands are so different, does that add another level of difficulty for the integrator? “Like any stadium what you’re really looking for is uniformity, so when you walk from one stand to the next it sounds the same. We had to come up with something that was not too heavy for the old parts of the stand, and it wasn’t too big, so it fell in the line of the cameras on the lower stands. We had to find something that was compact, powerful and could use in every stand. That was a challenge and we looked at many different products. We were lucky the Torus came out at the perfect time. It’s a constant curvature array and you can hang a sub off the top of it. There’s a back row of speakers as well. No matter what we tried we couldn’t get sound to from. You can do other things with acoustics but putting sound through solid walls is not one of them,” says Inkster.
Was Imperium able to test a lot of the kit off-site, or did it all have to be done on-site? “We did do a lot of testing off-site in terms of speakers, when we were running through the different options. We set up a big rig with different arrays hung from it and tested them all to see which ones would give us the quality we wanted. In terms of the actual integration it was virtually all done on-site, we set up the Media Matrix in the office, got it all up and running, and SOAK tested it exactly as you would on-site.”
With new ambitious owners (49ers Enterprises Global Football Group) now on board, there are plans to expand Elland Road. Thanks to Imperium’s design, the PA/VA system can grow as the stadium does, rather than ripping everything out and starting again. “One of the reasons this works as an EN54 solution is that if a company stops making a particular amplifier, we can replace it any of 8 or 9 manufacturers, and 20 different products, and we don’t have to change anything else, just a bit of tweaking of the software and its done. The benefit of the Media Matrix solution is the flexibility of what you can hang off it and hang on it. Because it’s multi-manufacturer, if you get one part that fails, you don’t have to swap it out like for like, and because it’s technically modular, you can expand it later.”
KIT LIST
Bosch EN54 ceiling loudspeakers
Martin Audio T1230 Torus array, CDD5 and CDD 12 loudspeakers, Blackline X12 loudspeakers, SXCF118 subwoofer
MediaMatrix NION n3 Dante DSP, nCIE PILOT control processor, sDAB 16i Dante 16-channel Input A/D unit, sDAB 8x8 Dante 8x8 channel Input/Output A/D, D/A unit, Peavey DMG-5G gooseneck Mic, Aureus 28 28-channel digital console
Powersoft Ottocanali 12K4 DSP, Ottocanali 8K4 DSP, Ottocanali 4K4 DSP, Unica 4K8 amplifier, Mezzo 604 amplifier
Optimal Audio Cuboid 5 and Cuboid 6 loudspeakers