MC2 AUDIO POWERS SOUND FOR TURIN WINTER OLYMPICS
14/04/2006

With the empty shells of arenas built for the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens still fresh in the public imagination, the organisers of this year’s Winter Games in Turin wanted to ensure that their host venues were equipped for a useful future long after the world’s media attention had moved on from northern Italy.

This was particularly true at two of Turin’s city-centre venues: the Palavela and Palasport Olimpico. While these two indoor arenas could hardly be more different, the approach to equipping them with a permanent sound-reinforcement solution was surprisingly similar, with amplifiers from UK manufacturer MC2 Audio playing a key role in both projects.

The Palavela, which played host to the Winter Games’ figure-skating events, was originally part of the Torino Fiera trade-show facility. A 1960s architectural icon with a sail-shaped roof (‘vela’ means ‘sail’ in Italian), it was immortalised by the car chase scene in the original Michael Caine version of The Italian Job. As part of a total internal makeover for the Games, the entire ‘sail’ was lifted off the ground inch by inch while the building’s interior was rebuilt, then lowered back into place.

That beautiful roof imposed itself – literally – on the design of the ice arena, which is higher on one side than it is on the other. The asymmetrical layout of the seating areas had to be given careful consideration when it came to designing the Palavela’s sound-reinforcement system, with facilities manager Giorgio Fassinotti insisting that high-quality audio be provided regardless, and briefing Pierluigi Peccheini of Italian consultants Direct Filed accordingly. Peccheini in turn recommended a system designed by Veneto-based pro-audio distributor Prase Engineering, around Community loudspeaker enclosures driven by MC2 amps.

Prase’s project engineer Marco Cappellotto worked tirelessly to devise a system that would exceed the client’s expectations, beginning work in November 2004 and staying on-site for much of the intervening time before the Games were due to begin, assisting the general contracting company, Maire Engineering, in all aspects of installation, setup and maintenance.

The Palavela’s 8,300 seats are addressed by an asymmetrical loudspeaker configuration with a series of speaker enclosures catering for the upper level of seating which exists on one side of the arena only. Power comes from a combination of MC2 E25, E15 and T1000 amplifiers – some 31 amps in total.

“The E-Series are great amps,” enthuses Prase Engineering co-director, Ennio Prase. “They can be matched easily to a wide range of speakers, which we found very helpful in this project because we were working with some enclosure designs that had only just been completed and were new to us. Their switch-mode power supply means they are also relatively light for their power output.”

In complete contrast to the Palavela, the Palasport Olimpico – used to host ice-hockey during the Games – is a new-build venue where the arena has been conceived as a ‘building within a building’, with modular seating at each end which can be retracted so that the venue can be used for conferences, exhibitions and other events now that the Olympics are over.

Here, Cappellotto and Prase’s on-site troubleshooter Dario Sari worked with the electrical contracting company, Gavazzi, to help install some 19 MC2 Audio E25 amps and 16 E15s to drive a total of 118 Community enclosures for the system designed by Arup Acoustics led by Raj Patel – most of which are hung from purpose-built trussing inside the roof of the 12,000-capacity hall.

Summing up the contribution made by MC2’s power to the Turin system designs, Prase says: “We’ve introduced a lot of audio networking technology into these venues and MC2 amps have played a key role in that. They have helped us give the customer total system redundancy and an open architecture, meaning that they are not only failure-proof but, we believe, future-proof as well.”

 

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