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When the Tbilisi Sports Palace became the subject of a $5M refurbishment, a new sound system and digital infrastructure were keys to its plan. Richard Lawn reports.
Until the beginning of the 19th century, the most popular sports in Georgia were horse-riding, polo, wrestling, boxing and marksmanship but, as the capital city of Tbilisi started to develop socially and economically, and integrate more with Western Europe, new sports from Europe started to appear. The Soviet period brought increased popularity of sports that were common in both Europe and the US, and pushed Tbilisi to develop the necessary sports infrastructure for professional sports. By 1978, the city had around 250 large and small sports facilities, including four indoor and six outdoor Olympic sized pools, 185 basketball courts, 31 football fields and five stadia. Currently, the Boris Paichadze Stadium, with its 55,000-seat capacity is the city's largest, with the Mikheil Meskhi Stadium, at 24,680 seats, in support.
In May 2007, the Tbilisi Municipality signed an agreement with the Logic Group to supervise and manage the Tbilisi Sports Palace for 30 years, in return for an investment of US$5M in its reconstruction. This included the installation of a sound reinforcement system in the arena that, following a public tender, Yamaha distributor Leon Ltd won, and was assigned the job of designing and installing a PA system. Dubai-based Yamaha Music Gulf assisted by providing simulations, system design, installation and technical support services. Marketing manager for Yamaha Commercial Audio, Akshay Khanna, and Leon Ltd's technical department head, George Germisashvili, were responsible for providing all the gantries and media technology in addition to installing a complete audio system. Yamaha equipment was used for the signal path in the arena itself, including the power amplifiers, controls, processors, mixing console and loudspeakers.
At the heart of the new system are two Yamaha DME8i-C and DME8o-C digital mixing engines. They have the ability to route all the microphone signals coming from the presenters, the control room, radio and the press, in addition to line signals from media players, CD, PC and DVD, providing all the necessary amplification, conversion and processing. After the initial D/A conversion, the signal passes through a programmable routing matrix and a user-configurable effects section which includes all dynamic processing (EQs, delays, compressors, limiters), all of which are vital for the mix and loudspeaker management. The audio signals are then transmitted to the Yamaha power amplifiers (four T4n and four PC2001N models) via the DME outputs, and to the loudspeaker system.
In the arena itself, eight full-range Yamaha Installation series IF2115 loudspeakers (in bi-amplified mode) are suspended from a 30 meter-high dome directly above the seating area, all controlled by the DME running on CobraNet. The Yamaha DME system is controlled by the arena staff using presets covering all the planned usage scenarios for the individual zones that were set up prior to commissioning. To the event organizer, this is a cost benefit as skilled technicians are not essential to the system operation, and the set-up cannot be interfered with. Should any adjustments be necessary, the audio support team can log on to the DME via the internet and update the system set-up remotely. With the addition of a network card (EtherSound/CobraNet), complex digital audio networks can be created that can transmit up to 64 digital audio channels over long distances via conventional patch cables with no loss of quality. The DME in the Tbilisi Sports Palace Arena has been set up so that the in-house operator can sit in the control room and remotely control all signal volumes in the various sound zones via a virtual mixer created using the DME Designer software, running on an IBM Desktop PC.
‘The CobraNet system was proposed bearing in mind the budgetary constraints and the complex character of the arena,’ Mr Khanna says. ‘To add weight to this proposal, careful simulations were conducted on both a Yamaha Sound System Simulator YS3 and Ease, to accurately predict speech intelligibility. Yamaha Touring and Network amplifiers were chosen for their remote monitoring capability, and taking into account the long cable runs that would produce electrical loss.’
The primary reason for choosing the Yamaha Installation Series Speakers was the ability to accommodate the group delays to counter comb filtering when used as a large, distributed system. ‘We opted for 60° x 40° and 90° x 50° dispersions, giving even sound propagation across all the seating levels,’ Mr Khanna adds. ‘Finally, the DME’s capability to run remotely and up to 64 channels of bidirectional signal over a single Cat5 cable greatly assisted us in keeping cabling in the small control room to a minimum. In addition, a wi-fi access point connected to the DME ensured optimal sound system tuning via a wireless Fujitsu Tablet PC.’
At the official opening ceremony of the refurbished Tbilisi Sport's Palace, the President of Georgia, Michael Saakashvili, followed the national anthem of Georgia with a speech congratulating the city of Tbilisi on its completion.
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