Praesensa public address system keeps fans safe at English Football League stadium
The Praesensa public address and voice alarm system from Bosch is at the heart of the new safety system at Wycombe Wanderers’ Adams Park stadium. The football club chose for digital infrastructure design specialist and system integrator Landways to design, fund and install this new system, alongside high-performance solutions for Wi-Fi and security, to help realize owner Rob Couhig’s ambitious vision for a great match day experience.
The stadium officials eventually decided on the fully IP-based Praesensa system from Bosch, which covers all public areas of the 10,000-capacity stadium and features a smart-power concept with integrated redundancies to save on energy, hardware and space. Supporting the required intelligibility for voice evacuation, the system assures security for fans, complying with the requirements set by both the English Football League and the local council for ground safety and survivability in the event of an emergency. The solution can be utilized for pre-recorded messages from the system controller’s digital message storage, or for live announcements from two Praesensa emergency call stations.
The audio signals from Praesensa are fed into nine Dynacord MXE5 digital audio matrices via the built-in OMNEO IP architecture. This perfectly matches the benefits of a combined prosound and public address system with the mandatory requirements for voice alarm systems to be fully compliant to the required standards. Functioning as a communications hub, the MXE5 can be used for all peripherals, with comprehensive supervision and monitoring of all system-wide commands. The seamless integration of all IP-based systems ensures that during an emergency, Praesensa messages are always ready to broadcast at the highest priority, with the entertainment audio automatically muted. With reliability ensured from the moment of installation, the feature-rich Bosch Praesensa provides Adams Park with a future-proof solution that can be easily configured and controlled via the intuitive user interface.
“I am delighted that our new digital infrastructure is now fully in place and available for the benefit of everyone inside Adams Park,” says Rob Couhig, Chairman of Wycombe Wanderers. “We are making a long-term investment in IP technology to improve the match-day experience, reduce costs and help our business continue to thrive. It is great that the same underlying energy-efficient infrastructure that delivers our incredibly fast Wi-Fi can also be used to deliver high-quality stadium audio and new safety systems.”
