Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland is a state-of-the-art, 51,000-capacity facility for sports, concerts and special events. Its waveform-shaped architecture is striking in design, and houses four tiers of seating, with seven stories of floors and two basement levels. Aviva Stadium is the home of the Irish rugby union team and the Republic of Ireland national football team.
Audio for Aviva Stadium is provided by a large-scale sound system that includes 105 JBL Precision Directivity (PD) Series loudspeakers, augmented by JBL Application Engineered (AE) Series AM6200/64 loudspeakers. The system also includes Crown Audio amplifiers and BSS Soundweb London signal processing, connectivity and control products.
The installation was carried out by the highly experienced, UK-based TG Baker (Sound) Ltd. under the supervision of project manager Tony Mott. The system was sold by Sound Technology, Harman Professional’s distributor in the UK and ROI, who also provided technical assistance via its project support services.
The Aviva Stadium installation is a fully compliant public address-voice alarm (PAVA) system that is massive in scale, with 26 42-U equipment racks, 118 PAVA zones, 59 paging zones and 365 loudspeaker circuits. It has an audio matrix of 172 inputs and 468 outputs, with spare capacity for future input/output expansion.
The system was designed to deliver a high speech transmission index (STI), an indication of speech intelligibility, along with a broadband SPL of more than 105dB and speech SPL of more than 101dB.
“During the proposal stage we considered a number of loudspeaker options,” Mott explains. “However, having successfully used the PD Series on other stadium projects we knew we could demonstrate to the client that the sound system would meet the performance requirements detailed in the specification.”
To fulfill the design, Mott selected JBL PD Series loudspeakers, and by using custom brackets, a variety of loudspeaker orientations and careful attention to directivity control, he was able to achieve uniform sound coverage to virtually every seat in the stadium.
Coverage on the single tier of the stadium’s north stand is accomplished using a combination of PD5200 and PD5300 Series loudspeakers on the edge of the roof.
For the other three stands, a horseshoe-shaped array of PD743 loudspeakers is used to evenly cover the longest throw from the gantry to the lower tier. PD5200/95 and PD5200/64 loudspeakers cover the upper tier, and a ring of PD5125 loudspeakers supplies the low frequencies. Five JBL Application Engineered (AE) Series AM6200/64 loudspeakers provide additional coverage.