Solotech stellar safety solutions

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Paul Malpas and Roland Hemming are experts from Solotech – a company that provides audiovisual and entertainment technology services and equipment – and they provide customized technological solutions integrated and installed with great care and precision and also help venues and any entities to keep their safety quotient high.

Both Malpas and Hemming are aces in integrating audio systems across diverse environments and deliver exceptional sound quality with tailored acoustic solutions. Solotech has done extensive works at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London and the Leicestershire County Cricket Club in Leicester – both in the United Kingdom.

Paul Malpas is the Projects Development Manager of Solotech, the global leader in audiovisual and entertainment technology. He is a Chartered Engineer with 35 years of experience in designing acoustic spaces and high performance sound systems to be used in these spaces.

Roland Hemming has worked in professional audio for 30 years. He designs systems and provides product development and compliance advice to a variety of manufacturers.

Paul Malpas, Projects Development Manager, Solotech, UK, and Roland Hemming, Consultant, Solotech, US, provides insights to ‘Coliseum’ on how they have helped to upgrade the PAVA systems at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London and the Leicestershire County Cricket Club in Leicester, England – both stadia in the United Kingdom. The duo swear by the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium project – “Tottenham is very much the exception as they have the kind of budget and the kind of positive attitude to investment in technology”.
 

Solotech

Montreal (Canada)-based Solotech is a global leader in audiovisual and entertainment technology that provides services and solutions for audio, video, lighting, rigging, and more.
 

Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the home of the Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur in North London (UK). With a seating capacity of 62,850, it is the third largest football stadium in England and the largest club ground in London.
 

Leicestershire County Cricket Club

The Leicestershire County Cricket Club is one of 18 first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales (UK). It represents the historic county of Leicestershire. The club’s limited overs team is called the Leicestershire Foxes. The home ground and administrative base of the Leicestershire County Cricket Club is the 6,000-capacity Grace Road Stadium in Leicester, England.

The duo starts off by stating that installing the new public address and voice alarm (PAVA) system at the Leicestershire County Cricket Club was “full of challenges”.

Remarked Roland Hemming, who is an independent audio consultant, “This whole project started a few years ago when I was approached by the England and Wales Cricket Board to actually provide some guidelines on how to work on the stadium sound system. One has to take a pragmatic approach and you have to weigh out all the different challenges you face every time. Leicestershire is a small cricket ground, I think about 8,000 seats and they had a very old system in place. Solotech was the successful bidder for the project and I am used to working on big projects and it was nice to take the big stadium approach and actually do exactly the same thing in a small space.”
 

Public Address and Voice Alarm (PAVA) Systems

Paul Malpas termed PAVA as sound system for emergency purposes – “It is a life safety system and if you take it further and build on those benefits it also can become a part of your entertainment system and therefore it will start to be part of your fan engagement.”

The PAVA systems can be used to broadcast pre-recorded or live emergency messages to help people to evacuate a building safely. Apart from managing building evacuations it can also provide background music and communicate information or instructions to a large area or building.

Malpas said that Solotech has done stellar work on projects they have handled “and the entities we have worked for their business plans started to evolve around that”.

He added, “We converge the life safety elements with the professional audio elements and you need a very comprehensive and flexible system.”
 

Tottenham Project

Malpas advised the venue owners/operators to take a page out of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – “But there is no reason why you can’t take the Tottenham Hotspur approach and apply it to space with literally one-eighth of the budget in terms of the public address (PA) system.”

The audio installation at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium provides both high impact, quality audio throughout the stadium (for pre-match entertainment for example) as well as delivering important information, safety and evacuation announcements as part of the venue’s critical security and emergency procedures – the PAVA system.

The entire audio system at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is built on a digital network. Because the system is a critical element of the fire and evacuation procedures, the network has comprehensive redundancy built in throughout.
 

Leicestershire Project

At the Grace Road Stadium of the Leicestershire County Cricket Club the previous PAVA System was about 15 to 20 years old and it gave them a single control to the whole site.

Added Malpas, “Solotech is known for providing these kinds of bespoke solutions to the specially engineered projects.”

Stated Hemming, “The Emergency Panel gives them (Leicestershire County Cricket Club) complete control and it is operated from touch screen, is user-friendly, it’s flexible, very easy to make changes in the future. It just gives them the ability to press any part of the site and provides a really elegant control of the whole system.”

Talking about the challenges, Malpas informed, “Since the Grace Road Stadium is not a new build we had to work with whatever was available to us.”

Echoing similar sentiments, Holland said, “We were really worried like getting cables to some of the locations and we realized that it is going to be extremely challenging.”

The duo stated with a sense of pride that their installation team, however, “figured it out”.

With the Solotech team working their fingers to the bone, the Leicestershire County Cricket Club is now compliant to the evacuation regulations and in their hospitality suites it has given them a far improved audio experience and they can hold major acts without needing to bring in extra gear and that would help them also with revenue generation.
 

Sum-up

The above projects bear testimony to the fact that Solotech is committed to people’s safety and their audiovisual (AV) expertise is unparalleled.

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