Event Overview
A touring headline act booked a 30,000-capacity indoor stadium bowl for a single-night concert — a building designed for sport, with a hard concrete bowl and none of the acoustic treatment a purpose-built arena would have. Soundwork supplied the full PA package alongside the touring production.
The Acoustic Problem
Indoor stadium bowls are notoriously difficult rooms: exposed concrete and steel produce reverberation times well past what any touring engineer wants to fight. The brief was to cover the full bowl — floor and three tiers of seating — while keeping direct-to-reverberant sound ratio high enough that lyrics stayed intelligible from the nosebleed sections.
System Specification
- Main hangs: Alpha A1 × 18 per side (flown at 22 m, targeting the far upper tier)
- Delay hangs: Alpha A2 × 8 per side (mid-bowl, time-aligned to the mains)
- Subwoofer array: Alpha S18 × 24 (cardioid end-fire, flown center-hang to avoid floor-level reflection)
- Front-fill: Alpha P1 × 10 (floor-level, first ten rows)
Managing the Reverberant Field
The system processor's room-compensation preset for hard-surface bowls pulled 3 dB out of the 400 Hz–800 Hz band, the range where the concrete structure's reflections built up fastest. Combined with tight delay-hang time alignment, measured speech intelligibility in the upper tiers held at STI 0.68 — solidly intelligible for a room this reflective.
Result
The touring FOH engineer, who had run the same set through four other arenas that month, called the coverage "the most even top-tier the system's gotten all tour" — a rare compliment for a building never designed to sound good in the first place.
