Outline audio for the 2012 European Soccer Championship

Massive installation of Outline point source enclosures in Poland’s major stadiums

Poznan’s City Stadium is currently the largest sports arena in Poland and home to the country’s national soccer champions, Lech Poznan. In 2012, the stadium will be one of the venues hosting the Euro championship.

 The official reopening of the venue after its modernization work was held on September 20^th 2010. The event featured a concert by Sting (a date on his celebrated Symphonicity world tour).

 The stadium has a seating capacity of 43,741 and the venue’s architecture comprises three new stands and a small historical stand that has been integrated into the new building.

 Lech played its first international match at the stadium on September 30^th against Red Bull Salzburg (in the UEFA Europa League), which the club won 2-0 with goals by Arboleda and Peszko.

 All tickets for the match were sold out and the venue was full. The next international matches will be on November 4^th (against Manchester City FC) and December 1^st (versus Juventus).

 Poznan’s City Stadium was supposed to be the first Euro 2012 object opened in Poland. Because of this, investors demanded the highest standards from all the contractors working on technical installations.

 The audio team had the task of ensuring even coverage in the wide seating areas and high speech intelligibility. This was achieved using a quantity of high performance loudspeakers.

 The system’s designers - with experience from the Legia Warsaw project - were Ambient System’s Krzysztof Mludzik and Kamil Slowikowski, who chose Outline to provide the loudspeaker system not only because of the products’ high quality, but also for the company’s professional support on the project.

 For example, together with Outline’s engineers, the designers specified a list of modifications of the basic products, made to ensure the speakers high reliability and resistance to harsh weather conditions.

 To reproduce speech and music in the stadium, Outline’s sole distributor for Poland, Ambient System, used a sound reinforcement system based on 52 Tripla II 9075 loudspeakers and 64 Micra II loudspeakers (covering the stands), as well as 6 Doppia II 9075 P loudspeaker systems (for the pitch). Power was courtesy of 34 T Five and 8 T Seven amplifiers, also Outline.

 The speaker setup used in this project was also tested by the means of acoustic simulations (i.e. EASE software packages). The simulations confirmed that for this large venue, only a fully professional set-up based on speakers such as Outline’s could have met the necessary standards.