UK - One of the Home Counties' most well-established sports centres, Gosling Park in Welwyn Garden City, has completed an extensive upgrade of its audio systems with the installation of an EV ceiling speaker system in its gymnasium. Darren Hughes, from installer Prosonic Systems, says: "Although well over 50% of our installs are done with ElectroVoice products, we had never used the larger C8.2-sized EVID ceiling speakers before. They were absolutely tailor-made for this project, and the results have been so impressive, I am now keen to use them in other applications as soon as I can."

Gosling Park is a substantial and well-equipped sports centre featuring a ski slope and athletics track as well as its indoor facilities, including a sizeable gymnasium and several sports halls. In the past, users of the gym had to make do with the sound from the television sets themselves, until Prosonic Systems designed and installed a two-zoned, 14-speaker system into the ceiling grid, using ElectroVoice EVID C8.2100v line speakers supplied by Shuttlesound.

"The walls on one side of the gym are mirrored," explains Darren Hughes, "so mounting anything on the wall wasn't a practical proposition, and it also made it hard to get even coverage of sound at the centre of the room. With a ceiling height in the gym of around two and a half metres, we had the opportunity to use the EVID ceiling speakers. These feature an eight inch driver that delivers clear highs, a solid mid-range and gives a much better bass response than your everyday ceiling speaker. A 10" ceiling mounted subwoofer is also available and can be added to the system, although we didn't use it at Gosling Park, its existence makes the system equally suitable for bars or retail outlets that require a high-quality of sound normally only associated with wall-mounted speaker installations."

Prosonic Systems has installed a two-zone system, incorporating satellite TV and a five-disc CD auto-changer, with control from a Cloud zone mixer. "The unit price of the EVID C8.2 may be higher than for many ordinary ceiling speakers but with a dispersion angle of over 110 degrees and higher SPL levels, installations generally require fewer units to cover the given area."

(Lee Baldock)


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