The Bill Copeland Sports Centre in Burnaby sets a new standard for community multipurpose arenas. With a very short 1.7 second 2kHz reverberation time, low background noise and a superior sound system design, this arena is intended to be more than a hockey rink. The superior acoustical specification requested by Burnaby will allow the building to host musical concert events, convention and trade shows, graduations, public skating and of course, sports events. With seating for 2100 in an end-stage configuration, this facility will fill a number of requirements that no other building in this area can.

The sound system in the arena is a high quality multi-zone distributed loudspeaker configuration with the capability to have sections of the floor and the bleachers switched off. Full bandwidth music quality is provided for the arena with ten 15" coaxial loudspeakers, aided by delayed in-fill speakers over the bleachers and the concourse behind them. In addition there are other stand-alone zones, including the public viewing area/meeting room, and a meeting/aerobics room, that can be combined with the arena sources.

Computer room modelling allowed us to fine tune acoustical performance and develop a sound system design that provided superb speech intelligibility performance. This image from the model shows the loudspeaker coverage from the distributed system over the ice and bleachers. The short reverb time provides a %ALCONS of better than 6% with all the loudspeaker devices driven.