Sitting at the confluence of the Ottawa and Petawawa Rivers in Southern Ontario, the town of Petawawa’s recreational hub is its Civic Center. Counting an arena, library, playground, soccer field, hockey arena, curling baseball field, miniature golf course and a large children’s playground among its leisure amenities, it recently called in Montaigne Audio to provide an audio system for its outdoor areas.
With coverage, clarity and reliability at the top of his agenda, Mike Montaigne designed a loudspeaker system to serve concurrent outdoor activities in various areas and able to inform of an incident or emergency. This could range from warning of a fast approaching storm, such as a tornado like the town had previously experienced, to a lost child.
The area to be covered was several acres, with a length of almost half a mile.
With a limited budget, he opted for a point-source system – and determined that the entire area could be covered effectively by a single Community RSH-462 loudspeaker system mounted directly on the front of the Civic Center building. The all-weather RSH-462 uses four of Community’s proprietary M200 ferrofluid-cooled compression drivers in an exponential FocusedArray horn system, capable of peak sound pressure levels of 150dB within a 60° horizontal by 20° vertical coverage pattern.
Incorporating an eight-channel mic/line mixer and a precision DSP processor, the system powers the Community loudspeaker with a 2 x 500W bridged power amplifier with DSP control.
‘The choice of equipment provides the audio quality, SPL and coverage required and we configured it to ensure reliability, with surge protection, brick-wall limiting at 47V at the loudspeaker and 400Hz-8kHK bandwidth,’ Montaigne explains. ‘A custom 400Hz passive 12dB filter with 6A fuse is final insurance against turn on surges, someone playing with the wiring or settings and catastrophic amp failure. The loudspeaker is fully weather resistant and operated at 70V so we custom designed a waterproof mount for the loudspeaker, transformer and its waterproof enclosure.
‘Loudspeaker positioning was critical and the end-results are truly impressive,’ he adds. ‘Voice is loud and clear with high intelligibility across the whole area, even at the busiest times during multiple events.’
More: www.communitypro.com
