Definition Branding & Marketing

Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland is a state-of-the-art, 51,000-capacity facility for sports, concerts and special events. Its waveform-shaped architecture is striking in design, and houses four tiers of seating, with seven stories of floors and two basement levels. Aviva Stadium is the home of the Irish rugby union team and the Republic of Ireland national football team.

Audio for Aviva Stadium is provided by a massive JBL sound system that includes 105 Precision Directivity (PD) Series loudspeakers, augmented by Application Engineered (AE) Series AM6200/64 speakers. The system also includes Crown Audio amplifiers and BSS Soundweb London signal processing, connectivity and control products. The prestigious installation was carried out by the highly experienced, UK-based TG Baker (Sound) Ltd. under the supervision of project manager Tony Mott. The system was sold by Sound Technology, Harman Professional’s distributor in the UK and ROI, who also provided technical assistance via its project support services.

The Aviva Stadium installation is a fully compliant public address-voice alarm (PAVA) system that is massive in scale, with 26 42-U equipment racks, 118 PAVA zones, 59 paging zones and 365 loudspeaker circuits. It has an audio matrix of 172 inputs and 468 outputs, with spare capacity for future input/output expansion. The system was designed to deliver a high speech transmission index (STI), an indication of speech intelligibility, along with a broadband SPL of more than 105dB and speech SPL of more than 101dB.

“During the proposal stage we considered a number of loudspeaker options,” Mott said. “However, having successfully used the PD Series on other stadium projects we knew we could demonstrate to the client that the sound system would meet the performance requirements detailed in the specification.” To fulfill the design, Mott selected JBL PD Series loudspeakers, and by using custom brackets, a variety of speaker orientations and careful attention to directivity control, he was able to achieve uniform sound coverage to virtually every seat in the stadium.

Coverage on the single tier of the stadium’s north stand is accomplished using a combination of PD5200 and PD5300 Series loudspeakers on the edge of the roof. For the other three stands, a horseshoe-shaped array of PD743 loudspeakers is used to evenly cover the longest throw from the gantry to the lower tier. PD5200/95 and PD5200/64 speakers cover the upper tier, and a ring of PD5125 loudspeakers supplies the low frequencies. Five JBL Application Engineered (AE) Series AM6200/64 loudspeakers provide additional coverage.

For more information on Sound Technology Ltd. and its project support services, please visit www.soundtech.co.uk/commercialaudio

For more information on TG Baker (Sound) Ltd., please visit www.tgbaker.com

For more information on the Aviva Stadium, please visit www.avivastadium.ie

HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets – supported by 15 leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon® and Mark Levinson®. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 20 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems.  HARMAN has a workforce of about 11,000 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported sales of $3.2 billion for the last twelve months ended March 31, 2010.  The Company’s shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NYSE:HAR.

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For additional information, contact:
Travis McGee
Definition Branding & Marketing
(212) 660-2555 ext. 24
Travis.mcgee@definitionbam.com

Founded in 1991, the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Festival has grown to become one of Colorado’s most popular outdoor music festivals. The recent 2010 event in Snowmass Town Park hosted a wide variety of artists including Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Black Crowes, Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Wilco and other acts. The 3-day festival attracted more than 35,000 fans each day.

Audio Visions has fielded a JBL VERTEC® system at the festival for the past five years. With offices in Omaha and Minneapolis, the company is the Midwest’s largest single-source, full-service production company. For the most recent event, Audio Visions provided a main PA system comprising 12 JBL VERTEC VT4889 fullsize line array elements per side, with an additional six VT4888 midsize line array elements in use for front fill. A dbx DriveRack 4800 loudspeaker management system was in use for front-end processing.

“After five successful years, we’ve grown to know the characteristics of VERTEC very well,” noted Chip Kempke of Audio Visions. “We know that the VT4889 has the performance characteristics needed for this large-scale festival, which features a wide variety of musical acts and styles.”

At an altitude of 2,500 meters (8,200 feet), the high elevation of the event location presents a temporary installation challenge. “The thin mountain air requires us to drive the system at a higher level than normal to deliver a high SPL,” said front of house engineer Elliot Nielsen. “The thin air really deadens the sound, so we typically have to push the system very hard. The VT4889 loudspeakers handle the situation without difficulty. The VERTEC system has performed as advertised; it’s an easy-to-use line array with a ton of horsepower and performs predictably in any environment.”

The outdoor stage venue itself presented another challenge. “The roof of the stage is curved, which creates some really weird frequency responses at various locations, and the sound can get a little muddled on the monitor mix side of the stage because of echo reflections from the roof,” said Kempke. “We’ve had to learn what the roof was doing to the sound distribution on stage and in the audience area, and make adjustments to work around it.”

The diverse musical lineup presented yet another test of the system for the Audio Visions crew. “The lineup of artists at this festival ranges from popular and rock to jazz, blues and hip-hop, so we need a system that can handle the varying dynamic contrasts and still provide high-quality sound,” Kempke pointed out. “We’ve found that JBL VERTEC loudspeakers have superior sound quality compared to competitive models, along with the requisite directivity characteristics and power-handling capability for a large-scale outdoor event.”

For more information on Audio Visions, please visit http://www.audio-visions.com

HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets – supported by 15 leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon® and Mark Levinson®. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 20 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems.  HARMAN has a workforce of about 11,000 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported sales of $3.2 billion for the last twelve months ended March 31, 2010.  The Company’s shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NYSE:HAR.

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For additional information, contact:

Travis McGee
Definition Branding & Marketing
(212) 660-2555 ext. 24
Travis.mcgee@definitionbam.com