Overview of the Hillside stadium
Sound Solutions was awarded the installation of a new sound system at the Kamloops Hillside football stadium in June of 2019, after submitting a design in April of 2019 to replace the aging 13 year old distributed sound system. The original system had a total of 17 twelve inch all weather speaker cabinets around the stadium, with 12 of them being mounted on light poles in two rows of 6 speakers. With the speakers being 100m apart from each other, the echo received in the spectator stands was terrible, making many announcements unintelligible. The main recreation centre next to the stadium was also concave, which reflected additional sound into the stands. Depending on where you were standing on the field or in the stands, a simple ‘hello’ message ended up being ‘hellohello….. hello’, as the sound reflected off the rec centre building. With the existing sound system being 13 years old, it was also necessary to upgrade the system to maintain reliability along with improved intelligibility.
Image displaying 6 speaker pairs mounted to light poles around the stadium, causing significant sound echos and delays depending on where you stood in the stadium
After consulting with the engineering team at Community Loudspeakers, and discussions with local electrical contractor Keldon Electric, it was decided that an excellent solution would be to place a single point source speaker system on top of the main recreation building to cover the main field and the spectator seating, with an additional speaker to cover the smaller triangular field area just outside of the main football field area. Three additional speakers were added outside of the media room to cover the spectator seating area only, in cases where broadcasts didn’t need to reach the football field area.
The existing DJ mixer and DVD player left a lot to be desired as to ease of control of the sound system
The main sound system was located in the media room in the middle of the spectator stands, with the main recreation centre building being about 500’ away. The challenge was getting the audio signal from the music and microphone sources from the media room to an amplifier located directly under the new speakers on the roof of the recreation building. Consulting with the IT staff of the recreation centre, it turned out that there was a fiber network running between the two buildings. A 2 month test of temporarily installing a QSC Qsys digital signal processor revealed that the network was reliable, and transmitted audio between the two locations flawlessly.
Hillside Speaker Aiming Oct 2019- the model that the engineers at Community Loudspeakers supplied, showing speaker location and coverage of the field and seating areas
In July of 2019, we installed the first portion of the sound system. It consisted of various microphone and music inputs located in the media room along with a Factor RVC PRO plate located under an access hatch on the field. Two existing wireless mics and an AM/FM tuner were reused from the old system, as they were in good working order.
Community R6 and stand craned up onto the third floor roof of the Hillside Recreation Centre
A QSC Core 110f and 8” touch screen were used to route the input signals to a redundant gigabit switch network, that ultimately converted the CAT5 cable to fibre, to run to the main recreation building. A QSC CXD4.3Q amplifier was used in the media room to drive the spectator speakers and the monitor speakers located inside of the media room.
Birds eye view of the location where the R6 speaker will be aimed
A QSC CXD4.5Q amplifier, providing 1200 watts per channel was used to power the Community R6 and R2 speakers on the recreation roof. The four channel amplifier has two CAT5 cables connected to it, so that the audio is transmitted digitally via CAT5 and a fibre network from the media room. The networks are redundant, so that if one network fails, the amplifier instantaneously and silently switches to the secondary network without losing audio.
The system is constantly monitored for failures, and should a network go down, a warning message will be displayed on the touch screen in the media room, alerting operators to a potential problem with the network.
Speakers in their permanent location ready to be aimed
The Community R6 speaker is a monster of a speaker, weighing in at 125kg alone. It is fully weather resistant, and is suspended within a custom non penetrating mount bracket on the roof of the recreation building designed and built by Keldon Electric out of Kelowna, BC. The speaker is able to be aimed and tilted precisely for perfect coverage of the field and the spectator stands. The R6 speaker is bi-amped, with 1200 watts for the six 12” woofers and another 1200 watts for the mid-high arrays located within the fiberglass horn assembly.
Standing beside the speaker for size comparison!
Another 1200 watts is allocated to the smaller R2 speaker aimed at the secondary smaller field outside of the main football field.
In November of 2019, we turned on the sound system, and set equalizers and limiters to prevent any overdriving of the speakers with the vast amount of power able to be provided by the QSC amplifier. With the extensive monitoring of the QSC software, we were able to see that the CXD4.5Q amplifier drew 30 amps during bass note peaks, but in short enough durations so as not to trip the breaker.
The system needed a minimum of tuning, although we did reduce the low bass output slightly to prevent low bass rumble from being heard within the main recreation building. At full volume levels, we heard a small echo from the university residence building about 1000’ away. Under normal use however, the sound was contained within the football field, with no noise complaints coming from neighboring residences.
Main sound rack in media room showing the QSC Core 110f, The two Dlink network switches, and the QSC CXD4.3Q amplifier driving the media room speakers
Rack on the third floor, directly below the speakers, wired with 10 gauge wiring
Touch screen page showing that the networking of the system is running OK
All staff noticed a significant sound quality improvement immediately over the original sound system, and users complimented us on the ease of use of the touch screen system. We look forward to working with the City of Kamloops and Keldon Electric on future projects.
Check out the video below for an impressive demo of the Community R6 speaker we recently installed for the Kamloops Hillside arena!