Meeting Topic: Air Canada Centre Tour
Moderator Name: Andy Foord
Speaker Name: Dave Clark - Dave Clark Consulting; Marc Brunke — Optocore; Andy Foord - Westbury National; Guy Wallace - Westbury National
Other business or activities at the meeting:
Sy welcomed everyone to the meeting.
The next section meeting was mentioned. John Vanderkooy, Ron Lynch, Sy Potma will present reports on papers and workshops.
A vote was taken regarding interest for a meeting on December 28th with Paul Bauman.
Meeting Location: Air Canada Centre (ACC) 40 Bay St. Toronto Ontario
Andrew Foord introduced the speakers and itinerary.
Dave Clark (Dave Clark Consulting) began the talk.
The ACC sound system came about with Mr. Clark and Mr. Foord collaborating on the design, with implementation by Dave on the speaker end and Andy on the back end (DSP). Courtney Ross, head audio engineer at the ACC had particular desires regarding the outcome of the design.
The pre-existing system was here over ten years. Conditions to resolve included uneven coverage, unsatisfactory intelligibility in some areas, unsatisfactory reproduction of the announcer's distinctive voice, visual and sonic interference with respect to the banners, and incomplete concert support.
Visuals accompanied the presentation. The design was accomplished through EASE Modelling. Reverberation was not modelled — this was a direct sound model only.
Intelligibility was achieved through cluster design, the current being a compact system offering the opportunity to achieve uniform coherence. The other factor being uniformity, closer proximity to the audience, and greater number of speakers. Placement minimized the reflections they cause, and to accommodate the "room's" natural geometry. Nothing 'acoustical' was done.
Existing catwalks were utilized for ease of servicing the clusters. Tuning was done with the SMAART program. The first objective was to get everything sounding the SAME not necessarily good!
Audio playback samples followed.
The invitation to walk around the centre revealed good consistency. Some attendees remarked it sounded better at the upper levels; others thought there were minor dips in levels in various corners. There was a slight edge frequency wise overall. However, this stadium was basically "empty", and Mr. Foord did point out during question period that an audience presence will absorb mids to high-mids.
The audience was divided into three groups: a walk around tour; Andy Foord's presentation; and Guy Wallace and Marc Brunke.
The catwalk is 97 feet above the stadium floor. The roof is rated to hold 200,000 lbs. of weight dispersed across. The clock below the centre section is about 50,000 lbs. hung on the 4 motors and can support large touring rigs for major acts (Madonna, McCartney). ACC offers its sound system as a delay rig. All the centralized amplification is done from this area for the entire main PA driven by Crown 5000i's, all the processing is BSS Blue (controlled remotely through software), all of the transport for audio is CobraNet.
At the 'concert end', extra engineered steel was placed so that the bass array could be hung high enough so it wouldn't interfere with any of the concert rigs coming in.
Other parts of the upper level tour went through Leafs Media Hallway where all the media personnel from different news outlets are hosted, and the control room with a Soundcraft Vi6 digital console.
The main level included the K5 broadcast studio, and the outdoor screen.
ANDY FOORD discussed Implementation of DSP at ACC. Westbury's relationship with ACC began in 2005 after quickly solving the problem of the then current DSP system suffering a breakdown three hours before a hockey game, the fault being a capacitor in the start up circuit of the power supply that had dried out over time.
When the time came for upgrades, system requirements included: redundancy, scalability, distributed processing, and integration in all areas of the building. The latter being a desire to bring the ACC clubs into the bowl sound system in order to send audio from the bowl; and have it be an overall part of the DSP system.
The overall design starts in the control room. Question period revealed that programming for just the custom control panels took several weeks of work.
To properly time align delay speakers as fill for concerts, a graphical representation of the arena floor allows coordinates to be entered and with the addition of Crestron processor (with the pertinent formulas) talks to the DSP and provides calculations for the delay speakers.
BILL COONS introduced the final presentation with GUY WALLACE of Westbury and MARC BRUNKE of Optocore. Mr. Wallace talked about the 3 year project involving renovation of the control room in the first year. Activity is MADI via fiber. DSP distribution is CobraNet.
The previous year involved installation of the bowl audio system which involved many hours of implementation. The ACC has been converting from just PA systems to include broadcasts. The Soundcraft console does double duty for broadcasts and live work. Broadcasting, requiring high channel count distribution, made Optocore the 'logical choice'.
There are four layers of digital transport: AES, MADI, CobraNet, and OPTOCORE. An Evertz Master Clock provides bi-level and tri-level sync to video, as well as 48kHz word clock.
MARC BRUNKE talked about the technology and advantages behind OPTOCORE which is a matrix system based on a synchronous optical ring network with built in redundancy, capable of transporting audio, video, computer data & word clock over long distances. Mr. Brunke first got the idea that fiber optic would work better in 1992, while performing onstage. OPTOCORE started as a point to point system but changed to a network system after customer feedback.
A ring system has fewer fiber cables. There's no central switch which can fail, and no bottle neck in the system.
OPTOCORE is an open platform focusing only on audio data and exchange, and networking. This helps OPTOCORE form many technology partnerships.
Other features are electrical isolation which translates to no buzz. Word clock is utilized to synchronize the receiver to the transmitter. Marc feels "the synchronous way is the only true professional way because it matched the nature of data we have to deal with.
With a synchronous transmission we always have a very good work clock transmission."
There is less than 50 picoseconds jitter in OPTOCORE systems.
In response to a question regarding the capability to PFL signals was that this was in the working stage, even though current customers are quite happy using custom macros to achieve that.
Executive member Dan Mombourquette thanked all the attendees for coming to the meeting.
