QSC brings Q-SYS integration to Derby County Football Club

Derby County Football Club has replaced the sound system in its stadium with a complete QSC setup, including redundant Q-SYS Core 1100 processors, CXD 4.3Q amplifiers and Q-SYS I/O Frame processors.

The Championship club now boasts a sound system that would normally be associated with a rock concert, rather than a football match, and claims to have ‘the loudest and best sounding stadium in the UK.’

Along with replacing the bowl loudspeaker system and the electronics in the back-of-the-house areas, the team at RH Consulting also installed new amplifiers driven by Q-SYS, with the system using a combination of QSC amplifiers for the back-of-the-house and d&b loudspeakers in the bowl. All of the Q-SYS equipment was supplied by Shure Distribution UK.

“The system at Derby County had been in place for around 11 years, but under the new ownership of Mel Morris, upgrading the audio system was one of a number of projects that he was very keen to invest in,” explained Roland Hemming, principal consultant at RH Consulting. “Richard Northwood was the lead on the project, he designed it and worked very closely with d&b on the electro-acoustic design.”

Along with the Q-SYS processors there are also several small Q-SYS touch screens situated around the stadium for control and paging, with fully networked monitoring.

“We need to communicate with third-party equipment, with full monitoring and control of the d&b amplifiers which are up in the roof in air conditioned cabinets as well as talking to the network switches site wide because we have to monitor those as well,” explained Hemming. “We chose the Q-SYS Platform because we know that this system will grow. Derby County has plans for other parts of the site, and we can continue to build on those Core 1100 processors as we’re not using all of their capabilities by any stretch at the moment. They were put in as the foundation stone for many years of change and development to come.

“The local paper said it was the loudest and it may be, but it’s certainly the best sounding,” he concluded. “For a 30,000-seat stadium, the performance is incredible.”

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