Networked Audio Takes On Stadium Scale And Life Safety

Industrial Communication & Sound has completed a Dante-based audio system spanning 54 zones at the Cincinnati Open tennis complex, as part of a 250 million dollar redevelopment that more than doubled the venue's size. The audio network covers ten match courts, twenty-one practice courts, five new buildings, renovated facilities and common areas, and it does not do one job. It carries match audio, site-wide and emergency paging, background music, broadcast distribution, pre-recorded messages and zoned or all-call communications, and it integrates directly with Hawk-Eye officiating. The amplifier fleet is entirely Dante-enabled LEA Professional Connect Series, from the four-channel 84D at 80W per channel up to the 1504D at 1,500W per channel, providing 96kHz Dante and AES67 connectivity plus onboard 96kHz DSP, with output switchable per channel between Lo-Z and 70V or 100V Hi-Z lines.

Two details in that deployment deserve attention. The first is time. The integrator was given roughly sixty days to design the changes and about five months to install, program, test, balance and troubleshoot before the tournament began, which is why base amplifier configurations were built in software and pushed to pre-staged units rather than dialled in on site. The second is rack space. Single-rack-space amplifiers were integrated into existing network switch racks instead of dedicated amplifier racks being built across a doubled site, and remote monitoring through a cloud platform means the integrator can reach the system without being on the grounds. Both choices are driven by the same economics that apply to any large venue: the installation cost is paid once, and the service cost is paid every season.

Running life safety and entertainment audio on shared infrastructure is now normal, but it is not a casual design decision. In the United Kingdom, Protec deployed a Nexo emergency voice alarm system at Blackpool FC, and TG Baker installed a JBL public address and voice alarm system at Chesterfield FC, both of which have to satisfy EN 54 requirements for voice alarm systems. The specification consequences are the same whether the project is a football ground in England or a tennis campus in Ohio: clear separation between general paging and certified emergency paths, redundancy in amplification and network routing, a documented failure mode for every device that could take a zone down, power design that survives a mains loss, and logging that proves the system was functioning when it was needed. Networked audio makes all of that easier to monitor and easier to get wrong, because a single misconfigured VLAN can silence a zone that the amplifiers are happily reporting as online.

Amtune supplies the audio and video building blocks that venue systems are assembled from. The range includes Dante and AES67 networked audio modules, modular Dante audio interfaces and AES67 audio modules for integration into amplifiers, mixing and DSP products, AV-over-IP codecs and decoders for video distribution across the same network, HD video seamless hybrid matrices for head-end routing, and AV extenders for the screens that sit outside the network. All units are manufactured under an ISO 9001 quality system and tested to CE, FCC and RoHS standards. Venue integrators and OEM partners can request documentation and sample units at sales@amtune.com.