AES Chooses Community and Powersoft for Pau Grand Prix

	Grand Prix of Pau

For more than a century, the streets of Pau city in the south of France are annually transformed into a race track as the city welcomes the Grand Prix of Pau.

Over two weekends in May each year, visitors enjoy a spectacular festival of motor sport events. The festival includes the Pau Grand Prix, a main event of the FIA F3 European Championship, and the Historic Grand Prix, which combines race track competitions, parades, vintage car shows, and private track sessions. Since 2017, the festival has also included the exciting FFSA GT French Championship, the French Formula 4 Championship, and European Formula Renault 2.0 racing. The 2005 Pau Grand Prix saw victory for a young Lewis Hamilton, who later went on to become a Formula One World Champion.

Rain during the first weekend of the 2018 event provided nature's ubiquitous challenge for both the racing drivers and the PA system. Beautiful sunshine over the second weekend allowed the drivers to use full throttle, presenting a different challenge for the PA.

Audio Equipements Spectacles (AES) designed and provided the sound system for the public areas of the event, including the five grandstands located at key spectator points around the track. To achieve the best sound quality possible, AES manager, Jean-Noel Cazalis, opted to implement a high impedance solution. Being a major provider of event sound, and with the contract for the Grand Prix of Pau for three years, AES was able to invest substantially in the system and chose Community R SERIES loudspeakers, which provided the sound quality, high output, controlled coverage and all-weather capability they wanted. Powersoft M Series amplifiers were chosen to complete the ideal system.

Cazalis explained, "The public areas were very large and the locations to install loudspeakers were quite distant from them. After discussing the project with Sequoia Audio-DV2, we bought 76 Community R.15COAX and 12 R.35COAX loudspeakers, with Powersoft M30D-DSP amplifiers to drive them." Cazalis continued, "Everything went extremely well. The critical parameters of coverage and intelligibility comfortably met our expectations. The system performed perfectly, with a lot of headroom!"