Pride Park, the home of Derby County FC. Built nearly 30 years ago, a relatively new stadium which houses several function suites, used for both match day corporate hospitality and social events, such as fund-raising charity events, student balls and other private parties. The stadium holds over 33,000 people and Igors suite, named after one of DCFC star players, is the largest function room.
The Installation Brief
The club are in the middle of upgrading various function suites over the next few years. Igors currently does have audio and a screen for presentations, but both require replacing with something more suitable for the size of the function suite. It takes up a large part of area overlooking the stadium, and curves round a corner of the ground. Because of this part of the function suite is currently without any audio at all and restricted visuals.
The ceiling is low and because of this, we only have a specific place behind the screen position, in a corner, to place the projector. The control input of the room is also currently in an unsuitable place.
The Solution
The venue will require a rear mounted screen, that is also flush mounted to the ceiling. Rear mounted and flush mounted are not unusual in their selves, but applying both to the same application is a little more challenging with only a handful of companies producing them worldwide. For this solution we chose an Italian made Giotto flush mounted, rear projection screen and a NEC P547 laser projector. Although the suite has a suspended ceiling, the concrete structure above was approximately 2 meters, so we used extendable projector mounts and uni- strut into the ceiling substrate to support. We chose a quantity of 16 ceiling mounted speakers from Belgian company Audac for the audio solution, for their slick appearance and intelligibility. They also have a specific tile support mechanism, which saves having to reinforce the ceiling tiles with a pattress.
We also installed a separate extra HDMi plug in point in case a different presentation position was required.
We split the audio over 4 zones, by using a 4-channel amplifier and the unnecessary expense of a dedicated zoner unit, being as only 1 input source is to be required at any one time. We opted for Sennheiser digital grade handheld radio microphones. Again, clarity is key here, as some of the functions involve keynote speakers, mainly footballer and cricketers.
The amplifier control equipment rack was situated outside of the main function area and the venue required good quality blue tooth connectivity throughout the function suite. For this we installed a Klark Teknik Bluetooth unit within the ceiling space of the venue
”Music Gear have done previous work at the ground and apart from being only 20 minutes away, they offer a great service and are very knowledgeable in their field. Bang on price wise too. We’ve got quite a bit more work AV wise to do over the coming years so sourcing a good supplier is one less thing for me to worry about!
Billy TidmarshAV and IT lead