The Ryder Cup

Teeing off at the Ryder Cup with SFL - Providing a sound solution for Castle Stanton Ltd

SFL provided a complete sound system solution on behalf of Castle Stanton Ltd for Ryder Cup Travel Services 'Celebration Marquee' at this years Ryder Cup golf tournament at The K Club in County Kildare, Ireland.

The brief for the huge 80m by 40m De Boer clearspan marquee was to provide a high SPL on the dance floor area in front of the stage, while providing speech and playback reinforcement for the remainder of the marquee - but making sure that these areas were not soaked with sound from the main front of house system - a brief that required both a complex and well designed system.

This was achieved by using a combination of ground-stacked d&b Q1 and Q-SUB for the main front of house system to provide the high SPL required on the dancefloor. The narrow and controlled dispersion characteristic of the Q1 boxes allowed the sound to be focused onto the audience area without affecting the rest of the marquee. d&b Q7 were flown from the lighting truss to provide side and rear fills for the stage - these were provided as the audience had to walk from behind and around the side of the stage to get into the venue.

The marquee was a hospitality area for people who had used Ryder Cup Travel Services to travel to the tournament from all over the world. One end of the marquee was dedicated to entertainment - this is where the stage was located, whilst the other end of the marquee is where a large variety of different food stalls and bars were located. Speech and playback reinforcement was provided in these areas with 12 d&b E3's, which were flown in 3 rows of 4 from the roof of the marquee, and were all delayed separately with respect to the front of house system. The E3's are perfect for this kind of scenario as their small footprint means they are unobtrusive, yet they can provide a crystal clear audio at a high SPL if required.

Entertainment on stage was provided by the world renowned Liam O'Conner show, which perform traditional Irish music with a modern twist complete with traditional Irish dancing. Also performing were The Galway Tenors, a 3 piece classical male vocal outfit, and The Kentucky Bluegrass Band. SFL provided a complete stage monitoring solution, running 5 mixes on 8 d&b MAX wedges, powered from QSC amplifiers. The whole sound system was controlled from a Yamaha PM5D digital mixing console.