While the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympic Games are fast becoming a pleasant memory, digital audio and routing technology implemented for the event portends significant and lasting implications.

Perhaps nowhere is this more in evidence than at the Olympic Park campus, which features an extensive public address system running on a fiber-optic backbone, expected to be in operation for at least another decade. Located in Homebush Bay, often referred to as the demographic heart of Sydney, the campus forms a 2.5km circle surround the Olympic Stadium and it includes a dozen other sporting and exhibition venues developed for the games.

From the outset, the campus was designated to remain a permanent fixture, with extensive residential, recreational and retail areas complimenting the athletic facilities. A commercial center for high-tech industry will also emerge, further revitalizing an area that previously had been, among other things, a naval armaments depot and waste dump.

Overhead at Olympic Park, where The PA People designed and installed a distributed system spanning the massive area.

As one of Australia's premiere design and integration firms, The PA People were already busy implementing a complex distributed sound system at the 110,000-seat stadium when summoned by Olympic organizers to have a look at the campus-wide PA system. Chris Dodds, managing director of The PA People, notes that although the fiber optic pipeline had been established to transport audio, lighting and CCTV, along with commensurate control data for each, serious concerns about the audio segment had arisen. "The client conceived what is best described as a 'mass transit'-style public address system that would also allow entry of localized source devices to be introduced on the fiber network, with this input distributed to selected zones," Dodds explains.

An attempt to attain the first phase of the project by the previous contracting firm can be quickly summed up as analog audio modulated on the fiber system with limited routing to zones via a single 16 input by 16 output matrix, falling short of expectations in terms of performance quality, flexibility and functionality. This direction scrapped, organizers turned to Arup Acoustics and The PA People a scant 20 weeks prior to opening ceremonies for a more effective approach.

"Our development of a complex control and routing scenario at Olympic Stadium, easy in operation, attracted the interest of the client and they wanted us to create something similar for the campus-wide system," Dodds says. "We were merging technologies such as Peavey MediaMatrix, Peak Audio CobraNet and Crown IQ with proprietary digital designs from Creative Audio, our sister company, into a comprehensive front-end package. It was fairly obvious that something like this could be adapted quickly for the campus."