CLIENT: Good Hope Centre
PRODUCT: Bose Sound System
BACKGROUND:
The Good Hope Centre in Cape Town, South Africa is an exhibition hall and conference centre. The venue hosts numerous events throughout the year from expo's to cultural performances. Quite recently they hosted an international netball test and will also host the ITTF World Cadet finals. The exhibition centre offers a wide range of halls and a total of 4,500 square metres of space. As a sports arena the venue has a maximum capacity of 7,000.
THE CHALLENGE:
The exhibition hall comprises of an arch with a tie-beam on each of the four vertical facades and two diagonal arches supporting two intersecting barrel-like roofs which were constructed from pre-cast concrete triangular coffers with concrete beams on the edges, thereby creating an extremely challenging acoustic environment. The client had no sound system and was spending large sums of money on rentals each time they hosted an event. Due to the acoustic challenges such as high reverberation, the sound quality was not always great. FS-Systems, being a leader in large scale Public Address and Audio Deployment was appointed to provide the client with a solution.
SOLUTION IN DETAIL:
After meeting with and engaging all Stakeholders, we had a clear understanding of the
client’s needs and expectations.This is a multi-function venue, which is used in many different configurations – stage events, live sound, arena style sporting events, trade shows and gala-type banquet events. The sound system needed to be designed in order to accommodate the varying needs of all events and needed to be easily configurable between the different settings required for each type of event. The sound system that we proposed was designed taking into consideration the performance, budgetary, and aesthetic factors unique to the Good Hope Centre.
The first step in designing the sound system was the determination of three key parameters based on the client’s requirements:
- What kind of source material will be used? (i.e. Sound systems can be "speech only," "speech and music," or "extended bandwidth.")
- What is the required sound pressure level?
- What are the budgetary constraints?
With these goals in mind we designed a sound system implementation. The four main criteria by which we design and identify high quality sound are:
1. Provide even coverage over the entire audience area:
Sound should be distributed evenly over the entire audience, or listener area.
2. Provide the appropriate sound pressure level:
The audience must be able to hear clearly over any ambient noise, and at a level
which is appropriate for the type of program being presented.
3. Ensure that there is no objectionable late-arriving sound:
Late-arriving sound which is isolated and high in level reduces speech intelligibility and can even produce audible echoes.
4. Provide the highest possible speech intelligibility:
Everyone should be able to understand speech played over the system.
Our design was driven by these 4 goals, and compliance with this criteria was demonstrated through the use of diagrams and charts relating directly to Good Hope Centre.
System Overview
The proposed sound system consists of 2x Modular Clusters of Bose RoomMatch loudspeakers arranged to be suspended from the roof of the hall left and right of the main staging area and are designed to provide even and adequate coverage of the main floor seating area of the hall. Additionally, there are 16 Pairs of Bose 802II loudspeakers suspended from the roof around the perimeter of the main hall to provide even coverage to the upper level seating areas. This part of the System will be configured to operate in two modes:
- As part of the main system for general use for events
- As a stand-alone system for sporting events, with or without the main PA
system.
CONCLUSION:
Officials from CoCT attended the Bose Roommatch “launch” at Good Hope Centre in order to gauge the system capabilities in a live environment. FS-Systems achieved the impossible – a high quality audio system in a venue generally regarded as an acoustic nightmare.