You may not have heard of the Znojmo Eagles, but if you’re a fan of ice hockey you’ll know that they regularly draw huge crowds to their games: ice hockey is serious sport when you get serious winters!
With the new hockey season looming, the 6000 seater Znojmo stadium owners were keen to improve the sound system capabilities as soon as possible, and make the multi-purpose ice sports arena in the Czech city better for all of the various events that are held there. Having been built in 1970, and extensively improved in the late 70s with covered bleechers, the last significant AV upgrade was over ten years ago to add a large octagonal hang in the centre of the ice, mainly for video screens.
Even during summer months the stadium is used for in-line (no ice!) skating so the system had to perform flawlessly with both music and speech (or commentary) for sports and casual entertainment events.
With our Czech distributor, Dancefloor s.r.o. at the helm, a truly multipurpose system was specified comprising, amongst other gear, Ti1048 processing and T-Series amplification. With the 8 individual outputs on the Ti1048 at their disposal, 4 independent zones were established, each tuned to suit the positioning of the speakers. This is a particularly tricky type of venue with the huge expanse of incredibly reflective ice, and the hard surfaces of seating, which is tamed somewhat when the audience are present. However, in some circumstances there will not be a big audience, such as training sessions and school usage, so the system still has to perform well under these conditions too.
The Ti1048 makes this easy for both experienced and casual operators to reconfigure the system quickly and simply with a range of specially designed presets to cater for the different operating modes, which can either be selected locally via the front panel, remotely from a control room via a computer connected or via a simple preset recall panel from a control cabin down by the penalty bench on the ice.
The finished system has been a great success, with much improved intelligibility and music reproduction and the ability to adapt to different usage scenarios very easily will mean that everyone benefits – from the Eagles to the schools!
