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Minigigs and Martin Audio turn sports arena into gala awards and party venue

The Sportcampus Zuiderpark is an indoor sports arena located in The Hague, The Netherlands. Opened in 2017, it is used for several indoor sports and the main 3,500-cap hall is the home arena of professional basketball club The Hague Royals. Every year, just before Christmas, the venue hosts the annual Sportgala, which recognises the achievements of local athletes and sports teams, as well as coaches, referees and volunteers.

Also based in the Hague region is Roel Bik’s rental supply company Minigigs, who were contracted to provide sound, light, video and rigging. While Bik has reinforced many sports events at the arena, the challenge this time was to convert a cavernous and reverberant multipurpose sports hall into a chameleon “theatre” type venue by providing a constantly changing technical infrastructure. This would initially support the formal awards presentation, before enabling the audience of 1100 people to make its way from the stalls and bleachers down to the main floor for the after-party.

A curtain then lowered to form a partition between those wishing to engage with the dance sounds of the DJ (replacing the live band of earlier), and the corporate dignitaries preferring to engage in polite conversation on the other side of the curtain, immune from the high SPL. Minigigs had to maintain intelligibility and mitigate against reflections and feedback from roaming presenters with head-worn mics.

The rental company had replaced its previous frontline speaker inventory a year ago with Martin Audio. “The main reason for moving to Martin Audio is that they have a solution for each of the projects we do”, says Bik. “We use Torus for a number of venues where we need the width of coverage, and the ceilings are low, and we need to direct the angle of the speaker. CDD-Live we use for applications where we need little cabling, and use Dante for getting the sound to the speakers. But just as important as good equipment is good service and our relationship with Martijn de Jong (at distributors Ampco) - and their experience with Martin Audio - was key.”

Minigigs had previously used their old line array in earlier editions. “But it had two downsides”, says Bik. “First, we needed an awful lot of speakers to achieve the coverage across the entire room, and with so many we sacrificed a lot of height so people walking in the area of the speakers with their headset microphones risked feedback. Now with the wide coverage and small boxes of Torus we can adjust the horn angle to optimise the sound and project directly at the audience instead of the walls.”

For this event, main L/R hangs comprised three Torus T1215 a side. “We then used a pair of 8in Torus speakers (T820) for centre fill and six for delays. We could deploy them above the LED screen without being in line of sight”, says Bik. Minigigs also deployed eight SXCF115 cardioid subwoofers in the centre of the arena. “We want to use cardioid subs for all our events”, he continues. “Low end coming back onto the stage when you have a presentation is not nice for the people presenting, nor at a live event when you want to get the lows to the audience without disturbing the neighbourhood.” This entire rig was driven by a combination of five iKon iK42 process-controlled amps.

Reflecting on the event and how the sound had remained continuously optimised and without coloration, Bik attributes the success largely to the prep work carried out by Martijn de Jong in Martin Audio’s Display3 visualisation software. “We made several renders and that’s how we determined all the subs should be positioned in the centre”, he says. De Jong, who worked as de facto system engineer on the night, adds: “We would only just get the first row in the coverage area and that was exactly the case when we were tuning the system. If we took one step forward from the first row, we would walk out of the coverage area.”

Minigigs serviced everything mostly from their own inventory, with the exception of some minor support from fellow Martin Audio network members Stairway.

(Photos: Martin Audio/Wouter Vellekoop)

www.martin-audio.com

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