Finland’s new Imatra Stadium, located in the Ukonniemi recreation area of the city,
is described “as an international standard baseball-, ski-, roller ski- and biathlon
stadium’ with a web of cross-country snow ski trails connected to the facility.
By relocating the former baseball stadium from the city centre and combining it
with the ice rink (and the other winter sports pursuits), the city of Imatra has set a
high benchmark. And with many different world-class events scheduled to take
place here, a cutting edge communication infrastructure — with both state of the art
audio and visual components — was essential to reflect this.
A tender document was prepared by AV consultancy, Ramboll and electrical
contractors, Etec Automation enlisted the help of technology specialists Audico
Systems, as according to their project manager Ilkka Hilden, the AV requirement
was extremely challenging.
The contracts were split into sound and video, and to meet the audio requirements
Hilden specified 30 RCF P-series wide dispersion two-way coaxial weatherproof
loudspeakers driven by Powersoft 8-channel Ottocanali amplification.
Integrated DSP was not required in this instance, as speaker processing was
handled by a third party DSP device.
Henry Tapiola, from the Stadium’s development company, Imatra YH, had foreseen
the difficulty in providing even sound coverage for a pair of uniform size football
pitches, and both covered and uncovered seating, which would be expandable when
needed. And the biggest challenge faced by Ilkka Hilden and his team, as would be
expected, was finding the best way to achieve optimum intelligibility throughout the
large stadium.
Finally, Audico faced challenging time scales, since the installation had to be
completed and commissioned in time to host a major skiing championship. “We
were not sure whether we could get the speakers fast enough and I have to pay
major respect to RCF — as those guys must have been working extra hours to make
sure we got the speakers just in time!’
There are three different locations for announcements and BGM sources — and
these have to be available for use at any time, and routable to any zone. The same
type of sources is located in two different control rooms, and additional wireless
mics are available from Reception if needed.
Finally, the installation is set off with a large 60 square meters (10 x 6 meters)
Absen LED screen.
