EAW OTTO ARRAY
with two ports, that means double the Cat-
6 cabling to each one, double the network
switches and ports, and so on.
That made for a relatively complex
integration process. “It’s about 250 Ethernet
ports in total, so it’s a massive network,
and then you have to run that Cat-6 to all
the cavities throughout the building,” says
Solotech’s Lemay. “I think some people were
surprised at just how much cable infrastruc-
ture we were dealing with.”
He adds that the process was com-
pounded by the project’s odd schedule. The
initial plan was to handle the installation
in the summer of 2019 between the Cana-
diens’ seasons; however, the arena was still
relatively busy, and the bowl audio system is
tied into the emergency paging system for
the building. That meant the system needed
to be steadily operational so, as Lemay says,
“We couldn’t just shut everything down for
a few days and do it all at once.”
As such, they broke the job into two
phases. The first involved the installation of 22
EAW MKD1096 delays on custom brackets to
cover the upper-bowl seats behind the ven-
ue’s wrap-around press gallery and was done
a week ahead of the 2019/20 NHL season. An
additional four MKD1096s were hung under
four of the Otto arrays to cover the ice surface
28 PROFESSIONAL SOUND
for the players. All are driven by a complement
of seven UXA4410 amplifiers with Dante.
The second phase involved the Anna
and Otto arrays covering the bowl, which
was done over a few non-consecutive days in
late 2019. On the first of those days, they got
four of the 16 hangs in the air – which Lemay
notes went rather smoothly – and then spent
the rest of the day tying them into the net-
work and getting their data verified by EAW.
Two days later, they had another window to
go in and match the EQ of the four new arrays
with that of the previous system so that they’d
work uniformly for a single game.
“That was our ‘hybrid system,’” Lemay
says with a laugh, noting the challenges of
temporarily tying the two systems together.
“The technologies are completely different,
so it’s not like we could just change amps
and plug in the same wires.”
For that game, he was joined by SFM’s
Paolo Bizzarro – the firm’s lead on the proj-
ect from the outset – and a rep from EAW
to assess and validate the system’s coverage
and performance.
A few days later, they flew the rest of
the arrays, had everything configured, and
did another assessment at the next home
game. The day after that, they went in for
fine-tuning and basically prepared to hand
the rig over the Leveille and his team to
assess on their own over the course of a
few weeks. Ever since, they’ve been taking
notes on performance and total coverage in
preparation for commissioning in late Feb-
ruary, at which point a SMAART engineer
will come in for final tweaking.
To ensure they were as lean and effi-
cient as possible during their limited time
in the arena, the team at Solotech went to
great lengths to prep and test as much as
they could in their Montreal headquarters
ahead of the install.
As Solotech’s Technical Project Manag-
er, Ghislain Veronneau, explains, “The main
reason it worked was that we prepped all the
clusters in advance the week before the first
installation phase, so everything was nearly
pre-assembled.” That involved assembling
all of the arrays, organizing all of the cabling,
and testing each individual cabinet. They also
set up the Q-Sys networking backbone to
ensure it was running smoothly.
After that, each Anna array was split
in half and put onto pallets with their Otto
counterparts to be trucked over to the
venue. “Then, we basically just had to put
one on top of the other and winch it up,” says
Veronneau. “Like any AV project, the more
energy you put in before the actual install,