Known as Mozart’s birthplace and as the backdrop of The Sound of Music, the Austrian city is home to EC Red Bull Salzburg – the eleven-time championship-winning ice hockey team. The professional league club play their home games at Eisarena Salzburg (Kunsteisbahn), an indoor arena with a capacity of 3,400 spectators. After more than a decade relying on a patchwork, inconsistent sound system, the venue’s Operational Team turned to a new solution powered by point source experts, KV2 Audio, to finally deliver clear, intelligible game announcements.
Over the years, the venue’s sound system had been assembled from mismatched components and no longer met the high-performance, festival-level expectations of professional sports venues. Existing loudspeakers were mounted in three-box clusters aimed in different directions, resulting in more than a dozen conflicting coverage angles in each section – making speech intelligibility practically impossible. To add to the problem, the glass, concrete, metal, and perfectly smooth ice surface caused intense reflections that further reduced clarity. EC Red Bull’s Operations Team turned to KEY-WI MUSIC, Salzburg’s leading music shop. “As a Salzburg-based supplier and installation partner, KEY-WI MUSIC is always looking to support local projects,” says Gerhard Bernegger, Founder and CEO of KEY-WI MUSIC. “As always, we evaluated solutions from major manufacturers, but we were confident that only KV2 could deliver an audio experience that met every technical requirement of the venue.”
To gauge a reliable first impression of a KV2 system, an on-site test was conducted at Eisarena Salzburg by audio-visual engineering specialists AV MATTR, who led the project’s technical management and system integration.
Read the full article from ISSUE 45 below: