TORUS TURNS SPORTS ARENA INTO A GALA AWARDS AND PARTY VENUE

The Sportcampus Zuiderpark is an indoor sports arena located in The Hague. Opened in 2017 it is used for several indoor sports and the main 3,500-cap hall is the home arena of professional basketball club The Hague Royals.

Every year, just before Christmas, the venue hosts the annual Sportgala, which recognizes the achievements of local athletes and sports teams, as well as coaches, referees and volunteers.

Also based in the Hague region is Roel Bik’s rental supply company, Minigigs, who were contracted to provide sound, light, video and rigging. While Roel has reinforced many sports events at the arena, the challenge this time was to convert a cavernous and reverberant multipurpose sports hall into a chameleon ‘theatre’ type venue by providing a constantly changing technical infrastructure. This would initially support the formal awards presentation, before enabling the audience of 1100 people to make its way from the stalls and bleachers down to the main floor for the after-party.

A curtain then lowered to form a partition between those wishing to engage with the high energy dance sounds of the DJ (replacing the live band of earlier), and the corporate dignitaries preferring to engage in polite conversation on the other side of the curtain, immune from the high SPL.

And with so much speech how would Minigigs maintain intelligibility, and mitigate against reflections and feedback from roaming presenters with head-worn mics.

While Roel Bik has much experience at this venue, it is only since the rental company replaced its previous frontline speaker inventory a year ago with Martin Audio that all the pieces of the jigsaw have fallen into place.

We received a number of great comments from production and other VIPs.

“The main reason for moving to Martin Audio is that they have a solution for each of the [projects] we do. We use TORUS for a number of venues where we need the width of coverage, and the ceilings are low, and we need to direct the angle of the speaker. CDD-LIVE we use for applications where we need little cabling, good sound quality and use Dante for getting the sound to the speakers. But just as important as good equipment is good service and our relationship with Martijn de Jong [at distributors Ampco]—and their vast experience with Martin Audio—was key.”

Minigigs had previously used their old line array in earlier editions. “But it had two downsides,” says Roel. “First, we needed an awful lot of speakers to achieve the coverage across the entire room, and with so many we sacrificed a lot of height so people walking in the area of the speakers with their headset microphones risked feedback.

“Now with the wide coverage and small boxes of TORUS we can adjust the horn angle to optimise the sound and project directly at the audience instead of the walls, which is a very nice feature.”

For this event, main L/R hangs comprised three TORUS T1215 a side. “We then used a pair of 8in TORUS speakers (T820) for centre fill and six for delays, as they are very small, and we could deploy them above the LED screen without being in line of sight.”

Minigigs also deployed eight SXCF115 cardioid subwoofers in the centre of the arena. “We want to use cardioid subs for all our events,” the Minigigs MD continues. “Low end coming back onto the stage when you have a presentation is not nice for the people presenting … nor at a live event when you want to get the lows to the audience without disturbing the neighbourhood.” This entire rig was driven by a combination of five iKON iK42 process-controlled amps.

And so the Sportgala award presentation went without a hitch. When, at the end of the show the curtains dropped the cardioid subs again came into their own, with their rear rejection, negating spillage back into the ‘quiet’ chatting area.

The transition to party mode had been seamless. The live band, on rolling riser, moved out, and the DJ set up in front of the LED screen, accompanied by a pair of CDD-LIVE 8, providing direct sound.

Reflecting on the event and how the sound had remained continuously optimised and without coloration, Roel Bik attributed the success largely to the assiduous prep work carried out by Martijn de Jong in Martin Audio’s DISPLAY3 visualisation software. “We made several renders and that’s how we determined all the subs should be positioned in the centre,” he said, while de Jong himself added, “It was remarkable how accurate D3 was; it showed that we would only just get the first row in the coverage area and that was exactly the case when we were tuning the system. If we took one step forward from the first row, we would walk out of the coverage area.”

The other big triumph was the deployment of the TORUS T1215. “Because we could set the [dispersion] angle we could project exactly to where the audience was sitting, and make the sound as evenly spread as possible, keeping it away from walls, floor and ceiling.”

Finally he paid tribute to Martijn de Jong’s work as de facto system engineer on the night. “We received a number of great comments from production and other VIPs afterwards—everyone was extremely pleased with the sound on the night.”

But ultimately it weas a triumph for Minigigs who, but for some minor support from fellow Martin Audio network members, Stairway, had serviced this mostly from their own inventory.