Completed in 1926, Providence Park is the oldest facility configured as a soccer-specific stadium for use by an MLS team. Two professional soccer teams, the Portland Timbers of MLS and Portland Thorns FC of NWSL, use the facility as their home pitch, and both clubs rank among the top ten in attendance among professional soccer teams (men's or women's) in the United States and Canada. Now, the audio pitch is enhanced with Dante.
[An [Atlanta] Brave New Vision]
The facility has undergone several recent renovations to expand its seating capacity to over 25,000, with associated infrastructure and AV upgrades. As expected with any MLS stadium, cameras abound around the stadium to catch the never-ending action from several simultaneous angles. The AV feeds are broadcast to multiple top-tier streaming services for the fans who cannot watch the match live.
But there’s much more to the AV experience at Providence Park than just the cameras. And all the sounds of the fan experience couldn’t happen without Dante.
The independent audio feeds are sent to Yamaha QL5 and QL1 mixing consoles for broadcast preparation. QL series consoles offer all-in-one mixing, processing, and routing capability for live sound, corporate speech events, installations, and more. A Shure AD4D wireless receiver paired with Shure Axient microphones transmits pristine audio via Dante from fieldside for transmission over the stadium’s public address system driven by BSS Soundweb London DSPs. AVIO adapters dot the landscape to help integrate analog signals from external vendors and partners onto the Dante network.
Providence Park has also invested significantly in accessibility for its fans and guests via an assisted listening program from Listen Technologies. Dante makes it easy to route different radio, Spanish language, or television broadcast feeds to assisted listening devices so that fans can have the full experience of watching a soccer game at the stadium.
Dante Controller software is a key element of the Dante platform, acting as a one-stop shop for managing AV routing—with separate, independently routable streams for audio and video. Users don’t have to worry about re-establishing routes when a device is moved or power cycled—saving time, worry, and setup costs.
In the future, Providence Park plans to implement Dante Domain Manager to expand its management capabilities, improve redundancy, increase security and segmentation of duties, and provide additional services. But for now, take a peek for yourself at how it all came together.
