EN54-24-compliant all-weather loudspeaker enclosures from Harman brand JBL have been specified and installed at the Stade de la Source in the French city of Orléans.
Home to the Union Sportive Orléans Loiret football club (US Orléans 45), the stadium has evolved steadily since being built in 1976. Its current capacity is 12,000, with extensions to the Marc Vagner tribune and the Tribune of Honour as well as a temporary/mobile stand.
As part of the most recent upgrade programme, a new sound system was commissioned and designed by installer Melpomen, following a successful tender response.
Distributed evenly across the three stands are 24 of the AW595-LS fibreglass enclosures from JBL’s EN54-24-compliant All Weather series. These two-way high power loudspeakers house a JBL Differential Drive dual voice coil, a 15in LF and 3in HF compression driver, with a large-format rotatable waveguide ensuring a homogeneous and coherent 90º x 50º coverage pattern to spectators.
Melpomen had encountered the All Weather series on a visit to the stand of Harman Professional’s French distributor SCV Audio, at the JTSE trade show in Paris in November 2014.
SCV provided the necessary technical support, and all modelling and predictions were conducted in EASE software by Laurent Delenclos, director of the distributor’s technical department.
“We have widespread experience of this type of stadium installation and with JBL’s All Weather range we have discovered a tailored range of speakers offering choices of directivity, said Sylvain Brottes, Melpomen’s project manager. “It complies with he standard EN54-24 and fully meets all requirements for quality and technical specification.”
Laurent Delenclos believes that with its EN54-24 certification the AW series provided the logical solution. “It met the dispersion specification required to achieve coherent coverage of the tribunes while conforming to budget considerations,” he said. “Therefore, it was perfect for this stadium installation.”
Although SCV Audio and Melpomen have enjoyed a long relationship, this has been the installers’ first collaboration with JBL. “And this is largely due to the fact that JBL is now proposing further EN54-24 compliant products fully adapted to this market, with no compromise on quality or performances,” Delenclos concluded.
