A hall built to echo, and a legacy system too worn out to fight it. Techniline replaced both at once.
Al Nasr Sports Club's main indoor hall in Dubai had relied on the same sound system for years to handle public address through packed basketball and volleyball tournaments. After years of heavy use, the system had simply worn out. Clarity, output and overall performance had all dropped to the point where referee calls, player announcements and match commentary were getting lost in muffled, degraded audio. Techniline was brought in to strip the old hardware out completely and design a high intelligibility public address and speech reinforcement system from scratch.
The room itself was working against any straightforward fix. Hard wooden flooring, parallel concrete walls and a high structural ceiling gave the hall an unusually long reverberation time, swallowing audio in bounce back noise before it ever reached the crowd. Rather than replace the old point source system with a like for like upgrade, we moved to a distributed lateral array instead, bringing smaller, controlled sound sources closer to the audience and the court perimeter to maximise direct sound and work around the echo rather than fight it head on.
We decommissioned the old hardware completely and mounted ten Wharfedale Pro Tourus+ 8 passive loudspeakers in a symmetrical five a side configuration down the long walls. Using a 90 by 60 degree constant directivity waveguide, we calculated precise downward tilt angles to keep sound off the reflective ceiling instead of bouncing straight back into it. A Wharfedale Pro DP-4035 DSP multi channel power amplifier drives the array, with custom high pass filters and narrow parametric EQ cuts dialled in on its onboard DSP to roll off the exact frequencies the room itself was resonating at.
Cheering fans, squeaking sneakers and game buzzers had created an ambient noise floor the old system had no way of clearing, and setups like it also tend to suffer from harmful turn on pops and fiddly manual mixing. We addressed both with a Behringer FLOW 8 digital mixer for strict gain staging, a Shure BLX dual wireless microphone system so referees and announcers keep full mobility around the court, and a Tovaste TST208 power sequencer that brings the rack up in an automated, delayed sequence every time.
With the FLOW 8's configuration locked down and the boot up sequence automated through the Tovaste sequencer, day to day operation was built around the stadium staff who actually run the venue, not around an audio engineer who isn't always on site. Nobody needs to touch a mixing desk to get the system running safely before a match.
The result is a hall that finally sounds the way it should. Spoken commentary and referee whistles come through razor sharp from every seat, with the muffled, degraded audio of the old system gone completely. Driven cleanly by the DP-4035 amplifier, the Tourus+ 8 array comfortably punches over the loudest crowd peaks without harmonic distortion or clipping, and the system keeps running reliably match after match without anyone on site needing to manage it by hand.
If you're managing a venue where the room itself is working against your sound system, we can design around it.
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