Old Barn Audio has completed its third Martin Audio CDD installation within Olympic class venues owned and operated by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA).

Following successful projects at the Lee Valley White Water Centre and Lee Valley Ice Centre, a challenging installation has now been completed at Lee Valley Athletics Centre in Edmonton.

This required the company to install a 30 metre long roof truss section down the middle of the 200m six-lane oval track, six and a half metres up in the air, to support over half a tonne of Martin Audio’s CDD 12, CDD 10 and CSX subwoofers.

Built ten years ago at a cost of £15m, the Centre plays host to a wide range of athletes, and by boasting 4,000 admissions a week, it is the busiest indoor athletics facility in the UK. Project manager Neil Kavanagh’s solution was to specify largely CDD12, enabling the CSX 118 sub to take care of the lower frequencies, as he knew this would not only provide the level of speech intelligibility required for commentary and handle background music during daytime training, but also have sufficient power to handle small concerts.

Kavanagh’s first challenge was how to tackle the acoustics of an inherently ‘live’ cantilevered venue, while at the same time integrating the pre-existing sound system. He specified 10 x CDD12, two CDD 10 and four CSX 118, ensuring that the subs fired down at the rubber floor, which would provide absorption, while the full range boxes were arrayed and directed at the 500 raked seat stand on one side of the oval (avoiding the facing wall entirely).

The internally wired truss itself is suspended from four points, with two tonne weight-loading and safety bonds at each end, while the speakers themselves are fixed using half couplers and are safety bonded. The installation required 200m of single 19-core cable running back to the power room and 400m of additional speaker cable on the truss.

“What I really like about the CDD series is the accuracy of dispersion – it has been designed to offer a lot of sound within the budget,” said Kavanagh. “Not only that, but the inherent coaxial speaker technology offers power coupled with a sonic performance that is unrivalled for the price.

“Now that the Lottery Funding has finished and venues built for the London Olympics need to stand on their own two feet, a powerful sound system such as this is a wise investment,” he concluded.

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