The Piotr Wieczorek Stadium has been the home of Piast Gliwice since its completion in 2011, when a completely rebuilt facility replaced its predecessor on the same site. Holding 9,736 spectators across four fully covered, all-seat stands, the ground meets UEFA standards and was designed from the outset with future development in mind. That forward-looking ethos has continued to define how the club invests in its infrastructure — and at the turn of 2025 and 2026, it manifested in one of the most consequential upgrades the stadium has seen since opening: a complete overhaul of its public address and sound reinforcement system.

The previous system had been in place for nearly 15 years. In that time, expectations of what a stadium sound system needs to deliver have shifted considerably. Match-day productions at Ekstraklasa level now routinely feature DJ sets, curated music programming, and high-energy pre-match and half-time shows. Speech intelligibility — always the baseline requirement — is no longer sufficient on its own. Clubs need systems that can handle music with the same authority they bring to announcements. At Gliwice, the old system was increasingly unable to meet that brief, with supporters feeding back that sound quality varied noticeably across different sections of the ground.

The club appointed leading Polish audio specialist TOMMEX to design and deliver the replacement. Working from detailed acoustic analyses and simulations, TOMMEX planned coverage, volume levels, and loudspeaker placement across the entire facility before a single unit was installed. At the heart of the solution they specified was CODA Audio.

CODA Audio’s G515-Pro, drawn from the manufacturer’s G500 series, was selected to provide full stadium coverage. It is a compact, two-way system with a power handling of 600W — engineered to produce the high sound pressure levels a football ground demands without sacrificing the frequency range or clarity that music reproduction requires.

Read the full article from ISSUE 48 below: