Tottenham Hotspur has selected an integrated HARMAN Professional audio solution made up of JBL Professional loudspeakers, Crown amplification, and a Soundcraft digital mixing console.

The system, including brand new JBL VLA Compact line arrays in the bowl, delivers an exceptional audio experience to complement the newly constructed 62,000 capacity stadium for the Premier League football club. The state-of-the-art sports and entertainment venue features a wide range of luxury amenities including an innovative retractable pitch, cutting-edge video screens, a museum and club shop.

The HARMAN Professional audio solution includes 156 JBL VLA-C2100 loudspeakers, 54 JBL VLA-C125 subwoofers, 196 JBL AWC82 all-weather loudspeakers, 140 Crown DriveCore Install amplifiers, and more than 3,500 JBL Control Contractor speakers installed across the facility. Audio will be mixed on a Soundcraft Vi2000 digital console and monitored via JBL LSR 305 reference monitors.

We talked with several key members of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium design and integration team to get their perspective of the project and how the integration of the HARMAN audio solution was selected and utilized.

“We wanted the stadium to be the best in the world and to deliver that, we need the best products, the best solutions, the best platforms, and the best services. So, we ran a capabilities-led approach across all of the different technology packages and identified HARMAN as the lead in that category and we were able to bring HARMAN on board as a partner,” said Fran Jones, Head of Partnerships for Tottenham Hotspur.

JBL loudspeakers were used throughout the stadium in a variety of spaces to ensure a premium customer experience.

“This project was unique because the Club had a very strong vision of making this stadium into a benchmark and with respect to audio systems, the design intent was to have a completely integrated system which meets all of the fan experience requirements,” said Mark Murphy, Associate Director, Vanguardia. “The Club’s desire was to really elevate the production value within the stadium bowl and we’ve designed a fully integrated system within the stadium bowl to provide the full fan experience and it’s worked really well for us to use the Soundcraft mixing console to route audio through to the stadium clusters and to provide the full production quality.”

“HARMAN came to us … with a concept speaker that eventually became known as the VLA-C. The Club worked with them to turn that into reality,” said Ollie Levy, Director, AVN Solutions. “The atmosphere from the fans in this stadium is phenomenal. The VLA-C certainly adds to it before the game, during halftime and post-match. It brings it all together.”

Jones added, “The interesting thing about HARMAN and JBL – it’s one of the only brands and partners that we have that are in all areas of the stadium. So in all of our general admission spaces but of course as well, across all of our hospitality spaces. We tried to do our premium spaces in a very different way to other sports and entertainment venues. We’ve really tried to set a new standard and of course within that, bringing the sound and the vision to life within those spaces has been a key aspect to add value to that experience so again those systems and those products are integrated in all of those different spaces.”

“VLA-C for stadium spaces builds on some of the component loudspeaker parts that are used for the VTX large-format touring line array and takes it and compacts it into a weatherized stadium-specific loudspeaker which keeps those qualities that we see in the big tour sound product but makes it much more suitable for the stadium market by using horn-loading, for example, to ensure that we cover very tight areas, very efficiently and maximize the intelligibility of the system,” said Ben Todd, Application Engineering Manager, Sound Technology Ltd.

140 Crown amplifiers ensure that the JBL loudspeakers and subwoofers used throughout the stadium combine the best in clarity, intelligibility and uncompromising sound quality.

“The JBL VLA-C2100 speaker has exceeded our expectations in both sound pressure level and intelligibility. We have 156 cabinets arrayed over 18 clusters and each of those clusters has got a three box low-frequency array behind it in a cardioid fashion – two facing forward and one facing backwards,” said Eddie Thomas, VP Special Projects, SSE. “We used a network with the Dante protocol on it to talk to the Crown amplifiers. We developed, with HARMAN, a plugin that allowed the amplifiers to sit on the network and we could extract all of the information from the amplifiers for fault monitoring and reporting but also we could control the audio going to the amplifiers through the Dante protocol.”

“We wanted to identify our requirements and then follow a process to identify the best platform and solution. We went through that process and identified HARMAN JBL as being the lead in its category to deliver the solution that we wanted for our requirements. And of course, it also helps us to be able to tell that story and tell a best-in-class story because HARMAN JBL is a name that’s synonymous globally – consumers and laymen understand who they are and understand that when you see a product with that name on it, it comes with best-in-class quality,” said Jones.