Case Study – Eden Park

About Eden Park

For more than one hundred years Eden Park has been the home of Auckland Rugby and Cricket. It’s a history full of rich sporting moments. Eden Park is New Zealand’s largest sports stadium.

Located in central Auckland, it is three kilometres southwest of the CBD, on the boundary between the suburbs of Mount Eden and Kingsland.

With a seating capacity just under 50,000 seats, Eden Park creates an unmatched atmosphere to experience live sport in New Zealand.

In 1992, Bartons Sound Systems installed the first site-wide PA system in Eden Park for the inaugural Cricket World Cup, and continues to service the Park’s audio needs to this day.

Project Brief

The existing hardware was installed in 2010 and was approaching the end of its useful life.

A scheduled upgrade of the system presented an opportunity to bring improvements to the sound quality and offer additional features such as multichannel sound.

Scope

Eden Park can facilitate functions, conferences, live events and venue hire to cater to tens of thousands of guests.

The entire stadium sound system network was to be upgraded, providing for gameday commentary, background music, and other announcements to all seats.

Transparent limiting was provided in consideration of the neighbourhood. The new system was to provide routing and processing at scale. Flexible analogue and digital inputs and ‘bring your own device’ control for hirers was a requirement.

The aim was to provide the best live experience and environment possible.

Customer Desired Outcome

Bartons Sound System has delivered this complex and extensive project within budget and on schedule. The main challenge was migrating system tuning from the legacy system to the new. Bartons Sound System also provides ongoing support via a remote management solution and on-site ninja technical staff.

Solutions

Eden Park has strict noise level requirements, and as such a dedicated hardware limiter in the system restricts the sound system to a max of 60dB LA10 (10 minutes) at the nearest residential boundary.

Sound operators are able to monitor sound levels and the amount of limiting being applied on the Video Room PC, Sound Room PC, as well as from a browser on their device (connected to the Eden Park Staff Wi-Fi network).

Immersive Panning

Panning of the inputs around the stadium can be achieved be show playback software such as QLab, console automation, or a bespoke automation recorder and user interface Bartons has developed utilising Q-SYS and Touch OSC.

User Interface

Gives a system overview with metering and hardware status. Muting and gain control of individual stands/zones. Accessible from video room, sound room or wirelessly anywhere in the stadium.

“We loved building on our long standing relationship with Eden Park using our knowledge, creativity, and the Q-SYS Platform.” – Bartons Sound Systems

“We were grateful to Bartons for their expertise and skill. They were able to offer a creative solution to meet our needs, including a feature we believe is a first for sports stadiums: multichannel immersive sound.” – Nick Sautner (CEO of Eden Park)

Contacts

Client | Eden Park

info@edenpark.co.nz

09 815 5551

Integrator | Bartons Sound Systems

info@bartonsounds.co.nz

09 373 2416

Distributor | NSL Group Limited

ali@nsl.co.nz

09 913 6212