Celtic Park in Glasgow, the home of Celtic Football Club, upgraded the electronics for its main PA to an all Dynacord signal chain.
The 60,000-seat stadium had a full audio refit in 2017 to enhance the audio coverage in the main bowl. This saw the installation of Electro-Voice EVH and EVF loudspeakers driven and processed by Electro-Voice CPS amplifiers and NetMax digital matrix controllers. While the system still performed well, the stadium realised it could gain in efficiency and performance with some upgrades and returned to integrator North for a solution.
The weatherised loudspeakers were still in good condition, so the decision was made to focus on the electronic backbone to the system. North recommended IPX amplifiers.
Richard Leadbitter, sales manager at Dynacord, said: “The difference in performance for the EVH loudspeakers is amazing. You have much more readily available power and the processing on them gives a marked improvement in clarity and control.”
The upgrade has seen the installation of 13 IPX 10:8 DSP amplifiers alongside a pair of IPX 5:4 DSP amplifiers. These add greater efficiency and processing power to drive the existing 52 EVH and 60 EVF loudspeakers flown around the stadium bowl.
Celtic Park has managed to reduce its energy costs through the increased efficiency of the new units that use Dynacord’s ecoRAIL technology. This dramatically reduces idle power consumption of the IPX series while still providing audio output, full system supervision and the capacity to restore full output power without any delay. When playing background music or pilot tone or when the system is in idle mode, power consumption may be reduced by more than 50%, all while the amp stays active and fully functional. The new technology has also allowed further savings for the club by reducing its overall UPS requirement by 50%. This further helps Celtic reach the Carbon Footprint goal of being the first ‘green’ club in the UK.
Further audio routing and control is added with a redundant pair of MXE5 Matrix Mix Engines. These performance audio matrices, combined with Sonicue Sound System Software have enabled a greater level of user control to be delivered with custom GUIs that offer various presets for aspects such as match days.
The North team headed up by commercial AV and pro audio consultant Jason Lee worked closely with the Dynacord team to create the custom GUI for Celtic Park and push the boundaries of the MXE5 matrixes. “Using the in-built panel designer in Sonicue allowed North to create a professional-grade audio control interface without requiring advanced design skills,” said Lee. “Being Icon driven, the custom GUI provides the operator a comprehensive dashboard with several key benefits for monitoring the PAVA system, enhancing usability, efficiency and responsiveness. It provides real-time status updates for all analogue and Dante signal routing, loudspeaker zone status, loudspeaker enclosure status, amplifier health, network connectivity and UPS monitoring across the stadium bowl, multiple rack locations and the matchday control room. In the event of an alert, the operator can quickly identify an issue by immediate visual alerts.”