THE
BELL
CENTRE
AUGMENTING THE FAN
EXPERIENCE WITH
ADAPTIVE AUDIO
T
BY ANDREW KING | PHOTOS BY LISA GRIFFITHS
he Bell Centre is
home to the NHL’s
Montreal Canadiens,
the winningest team
in league history and
near the top for all of
professional sports.
Subsequently, it’s also
home to one of the most passionate and
persevering fanbases you’ll find pretty much
anywhere.
In line with an idea becoming increas-
ingly pervasive in pro sports, the team’s own-
ers recognize that keeping those fans loud
and proud during games has just as much to
do with the overall experience in the arena
as it does the action on the ice. As part of an
ongoing effort to enhance that experience
across the board, the ownership team at
Groupe CH is investing in an expansive up-
grade to the venue-wide audio systems.
One of the first – and most significant
– of those initiatives is the recent integration
of a brand-new bowl PA system to cover the
21,000-plus seats throughout the lower, mid-
dle, and upper bowls, as well as smaller con-
26 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
MONTREAL’S BELL CENTRE WITH A NEW EAW ADAPTIVE SERIES AUDIO SYSTEM
figurations for the various events the venue
hosts outside of hockey games.
Professional Sound recently caught up
with the Bell Centre’s lead audio technician,
Jesse Leveille, and some of his collaborators
to talk about the design, integration, and ef-
fectiveness of the new system, as well as the
next steps for the venue-wide overhaul.
“We’re amidst a big transition in our technol-
ogies here, and the PA is the first big part of
that as it was most in need of an upgrade,”
begins Leveille, speaking to Professional
Sound ahead of an early-January match
against the visiting Edmonton Oilers. “It actu-
ally replaced the original system from when
the venue first opened in 1996, so well over
20 years old.”
Interestingly, it was actually his father,
Michel, for whom Leveille took over as the
building’s A1 a few years back, that designed
that first system.
He explains that a few years ago, they
hosted a shootout among a handful of loud-
speaker manufacturers and discovered that
they’d be looking at a significant financial
investment for an approximate 3 per cent
improvement in intelligibility; subsequently,
they forewent the expense for a few years.
By 2019, though, they’d reached a point
where components of the previous system
were starting to fail and decided it was time
to restart the procurement process.
Fortunately and as expected, that
extra time corresponded with notable ad-
vancements in loudspeaker technology,
with which Leveille had kept pace through
research, attendance at trade shows, and of
course, seeing various systems come into the
venue with concerts and other events.
One of those was a stop on the late
Tom Petty’s 40 th Anniversary Tour in 2017, for
which veteran FOH engineer Robert Scovill
was captaining an EAW Anya rig from the
company’s flagship line of Adaptive Systems.
“That was my first time hearing the sys-
tem, and obviously, when Mr. Scovill is at the
console, you know you’re hearing the best
of what that kit can give you,” says Leveille.
“The kit was interesting to me because of the
steering capabilities and other new technol-
ogies, plus its easy rigging.”