52 l December 2013


www.psneurope.com


installationfeature


Sochi 2014 is fully


THINGS ARE certainly hotting up in what will undoubtedly be a teeth-chatteringly cold 22nd Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Everything kicks off on 7 February, and for the following 16 days, 98 events over 15 winter sports will take place. Both the Winter Olympics and Paralympics are managed by the Sochi Organizing Committee (SOC). The city beat off competition


from Salzburg, Austria, and Pyeongchang, South Korea back in 2007, during the 119th IOC Session in Guatemala City; and this event will be the first Olympics Russia has held since the break-up of the Soviet Union.


Funktion-One has made quite the impact on two of the major Sochi venues: the 12,000- capacity Bolshoy Ice Dome and the 2km-long Bobsleigh Track,


The MST Horns are positioned high above the bobsleigh run


the latter of which is one of two multiple-venue sites that will be used during the games. Fourteen MST Horns have been deployed across the 2km downhill Bobsleigh site – in four separate positions. They are grouped in pairs or in fours, and combine individual attributes of 40˚ horizontal and 20˚ vertical dispersion to form horizontal coverage parameters of 80 or 160˚. The MSTs span a frequency range from 150Hz up to 18kHz. Extra reinforcement comes courtesy of 163 Funktion-One F55 compact speakers, 14 AX88 two-way passive mid-high loudspeakers, 18 AX8 speakers and six F118 single 18-inch bass enclosures. According to Funktion-One, its MST Horns have been designed “specifically for the challenges that stadia and arena


Now, THAT is a bass horn...


As Russia prepares for its first Winter Games, an impressive infrastructure is evolving and has led to the development of 11 new sports venues — two of which, Funktion-One has spec’d from the ground up, writes Paul Watson


Funktional


“The point of the big


waveguide is to have maximum directivity which leads to improved


Horns hanging in the Bolshoy Ice Dome


environments present”: due to their size, they are said to deliver high-quality lower frequency dispersion control without recourse to impact


compromising corrective processing techniques. This, in a nutshell, means in acoustically challenging environments, sound can be focused where it’s needed, without unnecessarily exciting the reverberant space, according to Funktion-One’s founder, Tony Andrews.


“Sound, as humans understand it, is 10 octaves wide; it’s a large bandwidth with the dimension of the frequencies involved being orders of magnitude different in size,” Andrews says. “You can easily achieve high frequency directivity – a horn of only three or four inches will control frequencies above 5kHz, and the waves are tiny, in the region of an inch; whereas bass waves can be 30- or 40-foot long or more, so my objective with the large MST waveguides was to control all the speech frequencies, including the chesty ones.


intelligibility” Tony Andrews, Funktion-One


“If a waveguide is not big enough to control these frequencies then they will diffract off its edges to the point where some of them will be propagating behind the waveguide reflecting back from the roof, arriving some milliseconds after the original – that is a real destroyer of intelligibility because you’re no longer on a nice original singular arrival. “More sound going directly to the audience area means less excitement of the reverberant field. So, the point of the big waveguide is to have maximum directivity which leads directly to improved intelligibility. It’s just the application of common sense and physics.” Less than 50km from the Bobsleigh Track, towards the Black Sea, lies the Bolshoy Ice Dome – one of the largest arenas in Sochi. Shaped like a frozen drop of water, its roof is decorated


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