New home of Qatar’s oldest sports club opts for Renkus-Heinz

The new 12,000-seat Hamad Bin Khalifa stadium in Doha, home of Qatar’s oldest sports club Al Ahli SC, has installed a distributed system of Renkus-Heinz TRX121/9 speakers and PN112SUB subs as part of its early preparations for the 2022 World Cup.

The venue is mainly used by the club’s top flight football team, but is also equipped for other sporting pursuits such as basketball, tennis, handball and athletics.

Following a competitive selection process, Doha-based systems integrator AVT was chosen to design and install the A/V and broadcast systems for the whole facility. Alongside the headline main stadium PA, this also included solutions for the multi-purpose hall, conference room, mosque and administration building.

To solve this challenge AVT found a variety of mounting points to ensure the whole stadium could be covered with the system. In the main stand it was able to use the lip of the roof to hang the weatherproof cabinets. While on the opposite side, a large wall running the length of the pitch provided the optimum installation position. Finally, the speakers covering either end of the stadium have been flown from regularly spaced poles around the rear of the seating area firing down towards the pitch.

The stadium has already hosted its fair share of high-profile international competitions, and this activity is likely increase as it moves towards the headline year of 2022.

"This project was under the Ministry of Culture & Sports (MOCS) because the Al Ahli Sports Club Stadium will be used as a training stadium during the 2022 World Cup," explained Hadi Arzouni, managing director of AVT. "MOCS are involved in all sports venues within the country to ensure they meet the high standards and international requirement set down by the likes of FIFA and the IOC."

For many stadia, clusters of cabinets are hung from the front lip of the roof to cover the seating area. However, only the main stand of the Hamad Bin Khalifa stadium has a roof and as such an alternate solution needed to be found.

"Kiran Dias, our sound engineer did the initial design for the stadium. When the project was awarded to us, we tweaked some of the design based on the existing site conditions. From there we took over as the project team,” recalled Julien Allag, AVT’s project manager for the installation. “Renkus-Heinz is a reliable brand from the US. It also has adaptability to the weather, a particularly pertinent point as our visit coincided with a heavy thunderstorm.”

Sources for the system include a rack-mounted RCF MS1033 CD player and a variety of Sennheiser wireless mics. Power is via a rack of QSC amplifiers and control is from a Allen & Heath GLD-80 digital console. The second major area of the install, the indoor multi-purpose hall, uses the same Renkus-Heinz TRX121/9 speakers, Sennheiser mics and QSC Q-Sys control with Allen & Heath mixing – this time on a Zed22FX.

"The main part of the installation took us from March to September," concluded Allag. "We have a good team who worked well together on the project. I’m very happy with how everything has turned out."