Wukesong Indoor Arena, one of the three major landmark buildings specially created for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, delivers top quality audio to its 24,500 spectators with a Renkus-Heinz PN102/LA self-powered, digitally networked four-cornered centre cluster and distributed delay system.

Post-Games, its world-class facilities were pre-planned to provide Beijing with a new, all-purpose live music and sports venue, capable of seating up to 18,000 fans. With a brief to deliver excellent speech and music to every seat, Taiwan-based Linfair Engineering – which has offices in both Hong Kong and Beijing, as well as Taiwan – won the contract to design, supply and install the complete audio and video systems into Wukesong Arena. The deal included substantial audio and video systems.

The tall, deep Wukesong Arena required careful audio design to ensure both vertical and horizontal front to back dispersion would deliver high intelligibility to each seat in a reverberant environment. Digital signal delivery and remote loudspeaker control and monitoring were also essential, using CobraNet and Renkus-Heinz R-Control respectively.

Linfair opted for a midsize self-powered PN102/LA line array, configured as a fourcornered centrally flown system. Each 12- cabinet array is mounted slightly above and outside of the scoreboard screen cluster, exploiting the system's 150 degree horizontal dispersion and up to 129dB SPL (program) output to maximum effect. These are supplemented by six self-powered Renkus-Heinz DR18-2 subwoofers.

The only seating locations not reached by the PN102/LA arrays, the upper ten rows, are specifically targeted by a ring of 20 Renkus-Heinz ST7/94 self-powered threeway loudspeakers. The loudspeaker line-up is completed by four more self-powered cabinets, two ST7M/64 and two ST7M/94 versions, which provide playing court audio coverage.

Renkus-Heinz technical engineers were closely involved in designing and commissioning the system's R-Control and CobraNet infrastructure and fibre optic backbone.

Rack room space, cabling and installation time alike were minimised through the use of an entirely self-powered system, each cabinet having internal Class D bi- or tri-amplification.

Linfair Engineering's Beijing office coordinated the installation and provided project personnel. Jim Mobley, Senior Applications Engineer at Renkus-Heinz, provided loudspeaker system design and system commissioning, modeling the room in EASE, while the Linfair Engineering team used Renkus-Heinz's Aimware software program to pre-determine optimum rigging point locations and coverage angle settings.

Jim Mobley comments: "We worked in great detail on the R-Control setup and were able to use it to apply a small but significant degree of the beam steering techniques we've developed for the Iconyx product line. This gave us an extra 'edge' in terms of dispersion controllability, which is a clear advantage in a reverberant space."

Audio distribution is via three MediaMatrix NION N3 processors, while sources comprise a Yamaha M7CL console and Shure ULXS4 wireless microphones.