Prosound in South Africa is on the verge of completing the remarkable feat of supplying sound to nine out of the ten stadiums for this year’s FIFA World Cup. Chris Fitzsimmons spoke to Technical Director, Mark Malherbe about what it means to the company to have been involved in such a prestigious series of projects.
Mark Malherbe started his audio career with artistic ambitions, and claims he only ended up working in installed sound as the result of a con-trick by Prosound founder Terry Acres!
After a stint as a theatre sound designer and engineer, he found himself working alongside his now employer freelancing in the late 70’s on various musical productions.
In 1984, he maintains, he was shanghaied into going to work for Prosound full-time, heading up the company’s rental department and bringing to bear his wealth of technology experience.
Finally, his transition to the installation trade was completed when the company started receiving enquiries for larger-scale contracting projects. Prosound moved into the design build business and Malherbe was selected to lead the charge.
“Up until that point, we had been responding to other people’s designs, but we decided there would be better business out of doing design-build projects.”
Back then, the company was already involved in all kinds of installations, ranging from performance venues, to mass transit stations, stadiums and houses of worship. And even at that early stage Prosound already had a strong relationship with key supplier, Electro-Voice.
“It was EV equipment we were using even then. You have to bear in mind that this was during the darkest days of apartheid, and that was one of the reasons the company became so independent. There wasn’t a lot of outside expertise coming into the company at the time. We had an incredibly good relationship with EV, who allowed us to keep on shipping in the product. We even built a lot of it here.”
In fact in order to circumvent the serious import restrictions in place, Prosound were shipping in components, assembling the cabinets and then sending samples back to EV for quality control testing. Many major vendors had simply abandoned the South African market altogether.
“It was a huge boost to us,” said Malherbe. “We were able to offer some of the best equipment on the planet, at very good pricing. It was certainly the best kit available in the country by a long way.”
Fast forward a few years, and EV and Prosound are still working closely, a factor that certainly helped the company in its latest triumph – the winning of nine out of ten stadium projects for this summer’s FIFA World Cup. Mark won’t thank me for saying that, but only because of the one that got away. A 90% success rate is nothing to be sneezed at.
But why were they so successful?
“There are two things that got us in on the nine stadiums that we got. One is our incredible track record – there’s no one else around that has done 30-odd stadiums prior to this,” explained Malherbe.
Back in 1995 when South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup, Prosound was involved heavily in refitting the existing stadiums. Following that, in 2005 the country hosted the Cricket World Cup and again, Prosound was there.
“The second key factor was that Electro-Voice equipment was used almost exclusively in the 2006 world cup stadiums. We were able to go into a lot of tenders and say, look not only do we have the pedigree, but we also have the product.”
Mark acknowledges that Electro-Voice’s director of technical support, Oliver Sahm was also instrumental to the success of the bids.
“In a lot of instances we were bounding things to-and-fro with him, asking him about design ideas. In some cases I think it was a bit of a learning curve for him as well, as we were dealing with budgets much smaller than he was used to. A good example of this was soccer city, where we ended up using a product in the PX2122’s that they would never have considered.”
I wondered if those budget restraints were also reflected in the decision to go with Peavey Crest amplifiers rather than the Electro-Voice products.
“To an extent yes,” said Mark. “But there were really a couple reasons, the main one being that we've worked with MediaMatrix almost since its inception. It’s a really well known product in our team, and to switch to NetMax in such a short time frame would have been a real challenge for us in terms of bringing our techs up to speed.
“Also EV weren’t quite ready in terms of integration between the amps and the DSP. The Crest CKi stuff is already tightly integrated with MediaMatrix.”
Writing tenders for ten projects is no mean feat itself, given that most of them were design build projects. Almost all of them had to be submitted within a three-four month time scale, which put considerable strain on Prosound’s resources.
“The real challenge for us boiled down to getting together the technical man-power for such a large amount of work. We’ve got a great engineering that looks after a lot of projects simultaneously, but not on that scale. Grant [Scott, technical manager] and myself were running our-selves ragged in that phase of things.”
However, coming out the other side, the company has seen real benefits.
“We’ve got a far bigger pool of resources to draw on now than we’ve ever had before. It’s given us the ability to go for even larger projects because we know we can do them. There’s also been a general uplift in skills within the company.
“A lot of our junior staff have really had to learn fast and come to the party very quickly in terms of training. We’ve certainly come out of this a much-much stronger outfit.”
And how about the bottom line? Surely nine stadiums makes for a lot of revenue!
“Well, I’d like to say that, but it never really works like that does it. I think what we’ve really got out of it is the fact that the projects have really opened other people’s eyes to what we are capable of, certainly in sub-Saharan and southern Africa. Normally for large projects people would really have looked towards Europe for a solution, but the profile we’ve gained here means more enquiries are coming our way.”
In typically understated fashion, Mark adds: “We’re quite chuffed with what has been achieved here. These are international standard venues which have been completed on time, and within a budget that wouldn’t have even been contemplated anywhere else.”
And what’s his favourite of the nine? “Soccer City for me is the ultimate, because it’s a totally South African affair. Everything we’ve done there, we’ve done on our own from design to build.
“It’s the stadium that Electro-Voice told us that we’d spec’d the wrong box for. From everyone that’s seen it, and heard it, the complements are flying in.”
You can see why that is later in this issue, as we report on the full installation project at South Africa’s largest ever venue.
With just a month to go by the time this is printing, it’s clear that the country is ready to welcome the footballing world, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mark and his team.