LEISURE FACILITIES

Blackburn Leisure Centre

In 2014 T.G.Baker (Sound) successfully bid for the supply and installation of the public address and music system facilities for the new Blackburn Leisure Centre.  The 8-zone public address system installed enables independent voice paging and audio routing to individual or groups of zones.  In addition, various areas such as swimming pools, sports halls, aerobics studio and the fitness suite support local audio control.  Through a wall-mounted panel, these zones can select to listen to a centralised audio source or to input a source locally such as an MP3 player.  The panels allow volume control in that area too so the areas can be operated completely independently.

The reverberant spaces of two sports halls and the swimming pool hall feature compact line array loudspeaker systems, providing controllable high-quality sound from just two main positions, cutting down on the reverberation issues commonly experienced in large, hard-surface environments.  This coverage is supplemented by low power projection speakers in secluded areas of the swimming pool hall.

The fitness suite and aerobics studio were provided with high-quality music cabinet loudspeakers, providing the high volume foreground music delivery required in today’s dynamic fitness environment.  A separate music system was also provided, built into a wheeled rack, providing aerobics radio microphone system and music sources with pitch control.  This system can be connected to any of the centre’s local input panels via the fly-leads also supplied.

Due to the site being shared-use with Blackburn College, the sports hall systems are each fitted with a key-switch so that they can be isolated from the main PA system during exam periods when the halls are used to seat students.

 


Emirates Arena and Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome, Glasgow

The National Indoor Sports Arena (Emirates Arena) and the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome is located in the east end of Glasgow approximately 2 miles from the city centre and is owned and run by Glasgow City Council. The project was completed in 2012 for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and has state of the art sports and recreational facilities that anybody can use.

The venue consists of the Arena which has a seating capacity of 5,000 seats, the Velodrome which has a maxim seating capacity of 4,500 seats, a Sports Hall with the ability to hold events for up to 1,000 spectators and a hub building that contains the gyms, SPA, fitness and dance studios as well as the administration offices for the resident City Council representatives and other sporting bodies.

The sound system consists of 5 rack locations that are interconnected with a dedicated fibre optic ring.

The loudspeakers in the Arena are all low impedance; 8 off Tannoy-VQ100 (infield), 8 off Tannoy-VQ95 (lower tier), 8 off Tannoy-VQ60 (upper tier), 8 off Tannoy-WA218x 2×18” lightweight subwoofer, 8 off Tannoy-VX15HP (end walkway) and 16 off VX15HP (upper tier infill). All of the loudspeakers are mounted on the gantry walkway above the arena floor and the mounting brackets were specially designed so that the loudspeakers could be serviced from the gantry without be lowered to the ground.

The loudspeakers in the Sports Hall are all low impedance; 14 off Tannoy-VX15HP and 4 off Tannoy-WA218x 2×18” lightweight subwoofer.

The loudspeakers in the Velodrome are all low impedance; 6 off Tannoy-VQ100 (inside track), 4 off Tannnoy-VQ95 (outside track bends), 48 off Tannoy-VQ60 (outside track on straights) and 8 off Tannoy-WA218x 2×18” lightweight subwoofer. Again all of the loudspeakers are mounted on the gantry walkway above the arena floor and the mounting brackets were specially designed so that the loudspeakers could be serviced from the gantry without being lowered to the ground.

The Arena, Velodrome and Sports Hall loudspeakers are fed from Lab.Gruppen PLM10000 and PLM20000 power amplifiers and Peavey Nion nE Dante DSP units. A touchscreen laptop running Peavey Kiosk software and 3 off Peavey nt180 controllers are used to change the individual venue configurations from non-event day to event day modes and provide music over-flow from one area to another. Also, an Attero Tech unDX2IO is used to provide a networkable audio input source anywhere required in the venue. All other areas are covered by a distributed Application Solutions 100V PAVA system. The dance studios each have a local portable system with PAVA cut-off.

Overall the venue has 20 PAVA zones with up to 44 inputs and 116 outputs, 4 off Emergency Fire Microphones, evacuation and coded messages, paging microphones.

 


Blackburn Market

T.G. Baker (Sound) was selected to supply and install the PA/VA system when Blackburn with Darwen Council constructed a new indoor market development in the centre of Blackburn.  The system provides voice paging, emergency evacuation messages and low-level background music to the market hall via a network of pendant sphere loudspeakers.  A second zone covering all market office and staff areas provides voice paging and emergency messages only.  Emergency messages are pre-recorded and stored on the main PA/VA system controller, and consist of Alert, Evacuate and All-Clear announcements. 

All loudspeaker and emergency paging microphone circuits are fireproof and fault-monitored and the system reports health status to the main market fire panel.  All zones feature interleaved A&B loudspeaker circuit topology for redundancy and all control rack components are battery-backed for ½ hour full operation and 24 hours standby.  In power fail conditions, music automatically ceases to be routed to the market hall in order to maintain the lowest power drain on the battery system.

 


Musselburgh Sports Centre, Dance studio

A small dance studio with two full range Wharefdale Titan 12 loudspeaker’s installed either side of a mirror facing the participants. The Control rack was manufactured and tested in our workshop prior to site delivery. This consists of a heavy duty headset wireless microphone system worn by the instructor and includes a CD player with Pitch Control.

Further inputs are available via the front mounted standard audio connections. All level controls are clearly marked and the system is very user-friendly. A rack mounted lockable storage drawer is included; this is very handy when storing headset microphone, batteries, audio leads and CD’s etc.

The system provides clear high-quality audio.