ORLÉANS, France – Fully certified, all-weather loudspeaker enclosures from HARMAN’s 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 consistently since being built in 1976. Today its capacity has been extended to 12,000 with extensions to the Marc Vagner tribune and the Tribune of Honour as well as a temporary/mobile stand.
Following the most recent upgrade program, the new sound system was commissioned and duly designed by installation and rental specialists, Melpomen, who responded successfully to the tender.
Melpomen had discovered JBL’s new EN54-24-compliant All Weather series on a visit to the stand of HARMAN Professional’s French distributors SCV Audio, at the JTSE trade show in Paris back in November. Realizing that EN54-24 compliance was central to the specification, they had no doubt in specifying them.
SCV provided the necessary technical support and all modeling 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.”
Distributed evenly across the three stands are 24 of the AW595-LS fiberglass enclosures. These two-way high power loudspeakers house JBL Differential Drive dual voice coil, 1 x 15″ LF and 3” HF compression driver, with a large-format rotatable waveguide ensuring a homogeneous and coherent 90 x 50-degree coverage pattern to spectators.
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 concludes.
HARMAN (harman.com) designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers and enterprises worldwide, including connected car systems; audio and visual products, enterprise automation solutions; and connected services. With leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, Mark Levinson® and Revel®, HARMAN is admired by audiophiles, musicians and the entertainment venues where they perform around the world. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and connected car systems. The Company’s software services power billions of mobile devices and systems that are connected, integrated and secure across all platforms, from work and home to car and mobile. HARMAN has a workforce of approximately 27,000 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $6.2 billion during the 12 months ended June 30, 2015.
