Peavey Commercial Audio has completed the installation of a networked audio infrastructure at Leeds United Football Club’s 40,000-seat Elland Road Stadium to support everything from voice alarm and emergency paging to background music and broadcast feeds.
Designed for a less complex environment, the stadium’s legacy audio system had long served the club but, as operational demands grew, the club recognised that it lacked the network integration, resilience, and remote monitoring capabilities required to support the multifaceted needs of a modern Premier League stadium. Matchday operations demanded a solution that could unify multiple functions – from emergency paging and general announcements to concert quality matchday entertainment and broadcast feeds – within a single, cohesive infrastructure.
At the same time, Leeds United required complete visibility and control over every critical component in the system, including amplifiers, DSPs and Fire Mics, ensuring that any issue could be identified and addressed immediately. The new set-up also needed to simplify day-to-day operation for staff in the Match Day Control Room, providing intuitive access to paging, routing, and system health information via a clear and intuitive interface.
Above all, the club needed guaranteed resilience. With tens of thousands of fans in attendance and strict safety regulations to uphold, the system had to remain fully operational under any circumstance, even in the event of a network fault. This combination of reliability, control, and usability formed the foundation for Peavey Commercial Audio’s design approach.
Working with the club through key technology partners, Peavey Commercial Audio engineered a comprehensive, that combines distributed DSP processing, centralised monitoring and full redundancy – claiming a new benchmark for modern stadia sound systems.
The installation employs a distributed MediaMatrix Nion DSP and centralised control architecture, across a redundant fibre-ring and 1Gb copper network. At the heart of the installation are two Peavey nCIE Pilot processors that continuously monitor the status of every connected device providing instant alerts and system health reports. They also manage Voice Alarm Control Indication (VACIE) to external units, guaranteeing safety-critical functionality under all operating conditions.
Audio routing and matrixing are handled by dual Nion DSP processors, each configured with identical I/O to accommodate all input sources – Emergency Paging, General Paging, BGM and LUTV feeds. Audio is distributed via Dante networking to a suite of Powersoft amplifiers, which drive multiple interleaved loudspeaker zones across both the Main Bowl and Back-of-House areas.
Each DSP ‘Edge’ system is also designed for stand-alone operation. Should a network fault occur, local units continue functioning independently, ensuring that emergency All Call messages remain active across the stadium. The modular design also allows for easy system expansion. Using nWare Project Linking, new DSPs or audio zones can be added quickly and efficiently, maintaining full communication with the central nCIE Pilots and avoiding downtime.
Two MediaMatrix Nion n3 Dante DSPs now reside in the West Stand, with four installed in the East Stand. They are joined by one MediaMatrix nCIE Pilot monitoring servers in both of those stands. The LUTV production studio, providing live match day coverage, is also home to a MediaMatrix sDAB 16i networked audio bridge, and there is also an sDAB 8x8 audio bridge in the East Stand reception area allowing a secondary none match day microphone to be operated and allowing match day connectivity to the adjacent Centenary Pavilion event space.
The installation includes Bosch EN54 ceiling loudspeakers; Martin Audio T1230 Torus arrays, CDD5 and CDD12 loudspeakers, Blackline X12 loudspeakers and SXCF118 subwoofers. These are accompanied by Optimal Audio Cuboid 5 and Cuboid 6 loudspeakers. Amplification duties are handled by Powersoft Ottocanali 12K4 DSP amplifiers, Ottocanali 8K4 DSP amplifiers, Ottocanali 4K4 DSP amplifier, Unica 4K8 amplifier and Mezzo 604 amplifier.
A major advantage of the new system is that Peavey’s core voice-alarm and control products are fully EN54-16 certified, giving Leeds United the confidence that the backbone of their stadium audio meets the highest European standards for life-safety communication. In practical terms, this means every critical audio path is continuously monitored, emergency messages always take priority, and the system is designed to stay operational even if individual components fail.
For a venue like Elland Road – where tens of thousands of fans rely on clear, timely information – EN54-16 compliance provides an extra layer of reassurance that the safety, evacuation and crowd-management functions will always perform exactly as they should.
Using the latest MediaMatrix NWare 2.0.1 software designed for EN54-16 applications, a custom NWare Kiosk GUI was developed specifically for the Match Day Control Room, providing operators with a simplified, touch-driven dashboard for paging, routing and real-time monitoring.
The completed installation delivers uncompromised reliability through distributed DSP architecture and redundant control, giving operators complete visibility and diagnostics across all components, while Dante-based routing ensures pristine sound distribution to every stadium zone. With a system that can work across a broad spectrum of third-party hardware, it is designed for expansion, allowing additional DSP nodes, amplifiers, or zones to be added without service interruption, while also removing any concerns about being bound to a single manufacturer’s ecosystem.
‘Stadia is one pro A/V sector where audio often takes priority over visual,’ says Lee Freer, Applications Engineer at Peavey Commercial Audio. ‘For communication, safety and crowd engagement, it is important to get the audio aspect of a stadium spot on. We are proud of our achievements at Leeds United and have built a long-term relationship with the club, who now have a cutting-edge solution that will serve them for many, many years to come, with future-proof capability when needed.’