Installation Europe recently got to tour not one, but three of the stadiums that will see action during this summer’s FIFA World Cup. Paddy Baker reports from the terraces

Click here to see more pictures from our South African stadium tour

When you hear that one company won the contract to install the audio systems in nine out of 10 of the FIFA World Cup 2010 stadiums, you assume that it must have approached some kind of central procurement body. In fact, in South Africa there’s a policy to devolve such decisions regionally as far as possible. This means that local knowledge can feed into the plans for the stadium, not only during the tournament but, perhaps more importantly, for the years afterwards, when the ground has to be a useful facility for that region. About the only downside is that to win these contracts, audio company Prosound had to make separate bids for each stadium.

“In every stadium there was a different principle,” explains Prosound technical director Mark Malherbe. “In some they appointed a separate AV consultant who had very clear ideas of what they wanted to achieve. In others it was the responsibility of the standard electrical contractor, and in others it was down to the builder.

“So we homed in on the optimal people on each project to target. If it was the builder, we went to them on a venture basis with a predesigned package and said, ‘Here’s the specification which we will let you print and use as your tender document, provided we’re given the opportunity to bid.’ We made sure it was generic – it was very much based on performance criteria.

“If we went to an electrical contractor, we tried to give them assistance in producing their documentation, or if they already had it, making sure their design was actually achievable.”

So how do you go about doing a basic design for the sound system in an as-yet-unbuilt stadium? Malherbe explains: “We had the normal basic performance criteria – speech intelligibility, frequency response, average SPL” – which enabled a preliminary design to be drawn up. “Once we got closer to the stadiums being built, there was so much material available because everyone was showing off what their city was going to have. We were able to get a sneak preview of what the venues were going to look like” – so the company could present proposals that fitted into the stadium designs.

You may have surmised that Prosound has some experience in the world of stadium audio, and you’d be right. Founded in 1973 initially to support the touring market, the company later broadened into fixed installation and in 1981 put in the audio system at Ellis Park rugby stadium. The American consultants on the project specified Electro-Voice loudspeakers, for which Prosound was (and still is) a local distributor. That install came to set the template for dozens more stadium installs by the company. “That Electro-Voice system sat there until 1995, still performing – and out-performing a lot of the more modern systems that came in,” recalls Malherbe. “We’ve used E-V in all our subsequent stadiums – we’d done in excess of 30 before the nine now for the World Cup – and it’s always done what we wanted it to do.”

In February, IE visited three contrasting World Cup stadiums: Soccer City, in the Soweto area of Johannesburg, which will hold the opening ceremony and the World Cup final; the Loftus Versfeld football and rugby stadium in Pretoria, which has had a new sound system for the World Cup; and Cape Town Stadium, a new-build venue also known as Green Point, from the name of the nearby stadium that it is replacing.

All of these feature E-V loudspeakers and Crest power amplifiers, controlled by Peavey MediaMatrix Nion units.