The recent Guangdong Provincial Games and Guangdong Provincial Games for Persons with Disabilities, held at the Qingyuan Olympic Sports Center in China, was supported by three sound reinforcement systems provided by AV company EZPro that all utilized Allen & Heath SQ Series compact digital mixers and supporting components.
“Firstly, reliability is absolutely critical for the sound reinforcement system when hosting large-scale competitions,” states Zhang Yangyang, senior technical manager of EZPro. “Additionally, due to the long reverberation time of the large venue space, the sound field design needs to be augmented with selective equipment to achieve the ideal sound pressure levels and, importantly, speech intelligibility.”
With these requirements in mind, EZPro deployed a pair of SQ-7 mixers, each with 32 onboard preamps and six layers of 33 faders, to run as primary and backup systems in the facility’s stadium to ensure no downtime in the audio output. Both mixers were equipped with SQ Dante cards with the Primary and Secondary ports being used to supply a redundant audio link to the power amps and loudspeakers. Three Allen & Heath DT168 Dante audio expanders, each providing 16 XLR inputs and 8 XLR outputs, were also deployed for remote I/O over the Dante network.
A 9,000-seat gymnasium that’s also a part of the facility adopted the same dual SQ-7 configuration as the stadium while the natatorium was fitted with the smaller 25-fader SQ-6 mixer to manage the system.
“The Allen & Heath SQ mixing systems ticked all the boxes for this prestigious event; compact form factor, Dante compatible, high-resolution audio, and easy to set up and operate,” Zhang Yangyang concludes. “Additionally, the integrated channel and bus processing ensured that the speech and music were clear for the competitors, spectators, and event staff. Everyone was happy with the results.”
