Allianz Arena Football Stadium

Context

The Team

Allianz Gets an Audio Upgrade in Line with UEFA Stadium Standards 

The Allianz Arena in Munich, which opened in 2005, is one of the most recognized football stadiums in Europe. Its most notable feature is its membrane made of nearly 3000 translucent air-filled cushions and is the first stadium to display an entire color-changing exterior. The three-tiered stadium construction houses 75,000-plus spectators who come to see top national and international sports—and is home to the football team Bayern Munich.

The Challenge

Due to the stadium’s impressive size and features, creating an impactful, scalable sound system was necessary to meet the environment’s needs. While the membrane roof offers engineering flexibility, it causes a formidable challenge for audio design, such as considerable reverberation in the spectator area. Careful evaluation was needed to create an optimized, even sound level distribution on all three tiers, an improvement in transmission quality for music recordings, and increased speech intelligibility for all types of announcements. Weight restrictions also played a large role, as did sightlines and optics. Allianz’s stakeholders had put so much into creating a unique, stunning environment and didn’t want an obtrusive cluster of speakers interrupting the aesthetic.

The Solution

To address the reverberation while meeting the weight requirements, care was taken to design a system that delivered sound to the spectators and minimized reflections. “An L-Acoustics Kara system offers an almost ideal ratio of weight, precision of coverage, achievable sound pressure level, and sound quality,” said Harald Frisch, sound engineer at Müller-BBM.

In total, the L-Acoustics installation comprised 266 Kara line source elements – 54 SB18 subwoofers for the main PA, with 48 ARCS WiFo as delay arrays in the curved areas, and 70 5XT coaxial compact loudspeakers under the balconies. The system is driven by 110 LA4X amplified controllers with a system output of 440,000 watts, which are distributed over ten central amplifiers, each with two 40U system racks.

System pictures

The Result

Jürgen Muth, Managing Director Allianz Arena München Stadion GmbH, was pleased with the results. “The new Kara PA system is the result of trusted cooperation with our technology partner Wilhelm & Willhalm and Müller-BBM as the executive planning office. With L-Acoustics, we chose one of the world’s leading suppliers in the field of professional sound system technology, which offers a complete package of sound characteristics, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.”

Project photos