When the £84m International Convention Centre Wales (ICCW) opened in September last year, it was not only the first of its kind in Wales, but this joint venture between the Welsh Government and the Celtic Manor Resort has delivered an astonishing 26,000 sq.m. of floor space for meetings, conferences and exhibitions (the size of four international rugby pitches).

Incorporated within this is a 4,000 sq.m., pillar-free, multi-reconfigurable main hall, which threw up many challenges for technology contractors, Stage Electrics. Their solution was to specify an end-to-end workflow from the extensive RCF catalogue, tying nearly 800 speaker products (and over 1,000 RCF components in total) into a multi-use PA in the main hall and mobile systems for the meeting rooms, merged into a fully-compliant PAVA environment.

Stage Electrics were awarded the contract for A/V, lighting (including public space), technical loose equipment and stage engineering consultancy, as outlined by Russell Phillips, VP, Facilities and Development at Celtic Manor. But first Simon Cooper, who led Stage Electrics’ engineering team, along with Business Development Manager Saul Eagles, needed to initiate a stringent, but uncompromising cost-cutting programme to bring it into budget.

Stage Electrics have enjoyed enormous success installing RCF systems into a wide range of applications for over 15 years, as Dan Aldridge, their Commercial & Projects Director, points out. “We specify RCF because of its reliability, the support we receive—particularly with regard to very large multizone distributed systems—and the price point. But the products are also sensibly differentiated by price whilst delivering exceptional performance and that makes it compelling for clients especially when ‘A-B’ listening and measurement tests are carried out as part of the evaluation, as was the case here.”Mick Butler, RCF’s UK Regional Sales Manager North  conducted a site demo of the TTL 6-A three-way active line source, and the decision to adopt it as the Main Hall system was rubber-stamped by Eric Rymer from venue consultants, Right Solutions.Originally, the voice alarm / evacuation had been subject to a separate contract, using another brand. But since this approach would have vastly exceeded the budget, Butler introduced Simon Cooper to Francesco Venturi from RCF’s Engineering Support Group. Talks were quickly finalised to place an RCF DXT 9000 multi-platform comms system (linked to RCF ceiling speakers, aluminium projector speakers, and Media background music speakers at the heart of the set-up. With cost efficiencies achieved, the entire workflow was now in the hands of a single contractor.

The sound reinforcement in the Main Hall functions independent of the PAVA. For this, Stage Electrics provided 18 x TTL 6-A elements, 10 TTL 6-AS active bass modules with RCF SUB 8006-AS providing further LF extension, all controlled using RCF’s proprietary RD Net. The 3-way TTL6-A line source is equipped with 2 x 12” low frequencies woofers, 4 x 6.5” midranges and a 3.0” voice coil compression driver while the TTL 6-AS contains three 12in woofers. Flexible and quick to rig, this scalable system can be set up as a one-box solution or expanded into a complete column, optimised by allowing the TTL 6-A tilt angle to be set accordingly.

A further six RCF EVOX10 and four EVOX12, along with the HD 10-A, HD 12-A and SUB 8006-AS have been provided as a highly portable roll-in/roll-out system for use in their 15 flexible meeting rooms, in addition to Media M801 for further reproduction purposes, including background.

As Mick Butler points out, “TTL 6-A can do all that and as it’s a line source system with wide horizontal and controlled vertical pattern—you don’t need to do comprehensive calculations every time you reconfigure the room, which can be done extremely quickly with this system.”

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