Summary:

The Rexall Centre, Toronto, is a fully functional tennis facility operated by Tennis Canada. This venue regularly seats 11,000, and is used to host the Rogers Cup Tennis Tournament. The stadium was selected as the venue for the BlackCreek Summer Music Festival and required extensive acoustic analysis and treatment in order to be functional as an open air amphitheatre.

Solution:

The venue is an amphitheatre of classic Greek or Roman size and shape. The seating provides each patron with an uninterrupted view of the court. Furthermore, it is remarkably intimate, with most of the seating within a 50m radius of the court level stage with the furthest seat being 72m away. The challenge became to create the same level of intimacy through the acoustic treatment of the space.

The first concern was to assess the acoustics of the empty stadium. Due to the large amount of exposed surfaces with no acoustic treatment, reflections were a major concern. A test of the bare stadium was conducted using a single line array, with both live and recorded music. A detailed acoustic model was constructed in EASE™ to analyse the test results and to predict/design the final stereo line-array pairs. These were mainly due to the exposed concrete fascia of the private boxes, the 300 level and on the long walls on the concourse level, and the glass walls of the private boxes. The concourse wall was covered by a rigid, metal acoustic panel painted to match the existing colour of the walls. The concrete fascia’s are regularly used to hang sponsor’s advertising during the Roger’s Cup, as such the same treatment could not be applied. Instead soft sided weatherproof panels were hung from the existing cable system using a specially fabricated aluminum bracket.

The same style of acoustic treatment was applied to the courtside walls of the stadium to address the reflection concerns as well as the audible flutter echo heard at the court level seating.

With these acoustic changes in place within the venue, the acoustic characteristics of the building were dramatically improved. With the improved low frequency absorption, and the completed acoustic treatment in place, the late reflected sounds, echoes, and flutter echoes were effectively removed. This allowed for the creation of the desired acoustical properties of the space without losing any of the versatility of the venue itself.