Located in the heart of France’s fourth-largest city Toulouse, the André Brouat Sports hall is a 4400-capacity multi-sports venue used mainly to host volleyball and handball matches.
Opened in 2006, the hall is built on the site of the former Toulouse Sports Palace which was destroyed in a devastating chemical explosion in 2001 which claimed the lives of 31 people and injured many more.
Considering an upgrade to the hall’s sound system, operators engaged the services of Toulouse-based acoustic consultants Gamba Acoustique to report on the viability of three possible solutions: A distributed point source system, line array clusters firing out from the centre of the venue and clusters installed below the circular walkway high above the front of the stands.
With the latter configuration deemed the most appropriate, the contract for designing and installing the system was awarded to local AV technology and production services specialists Novelty Occitanie who proposed a NEXO GEO M10 system.
Eight clusters of 7 x GEO M10 are hung around and beneath the circular walkway along with pairs of NEXO L15 subs for LF extension. Also located on the walkway are two racks of 3-each NEXO NXAMP4X2Mk2s providing amplification and processing, and operator control is provided on iPads using NEXO’s NeMo control and monitoring app. The original system is also retained for redundancy.
Working alongside the Novelty Occitanie team throughout the tender process, NEXO Engineering Support staff were also on-site in February for the final tuning and commissioning of the system.
“Novelty Occitanie did a great job installing the system” reports Melvin Frerot from the NEXO ES team. “Fine tuning went flawlessly with very good STI measurements. In fact, the game announcer was present at the commissioning and was very happy with the results.”
For further information on Novelty Occitanie, visit: novelty.com
