ENTERTAINMENT

Turbo Tennis, The O2 - September 2007

Following a very successful relationship with promoters Quintus, Sound By Design were contracted to provide engineering support for the Betfair Turbo Tennis event at London’s O2 Arena.

This is a new format of tennis, designed to be faster. “Forget strawberries and cream. Forget deuces and net calls. Betfair Turbo Tennis is an afternoon full of drama, lights, music and noise. With matches lasting no longer than 30 minutes and 'sudden death' points replacing deuces, this event will capture all that’s great about tennis, with none of the rain-delays and long rest breaks.”

Due to the date of the event, being a one-day show placed in the middle of Prince’s 21-date programme, the event organisers had arranged use of the newly installed in-house system. This enabled Sound By Design’s engineer Darren Rose, assisted by regular freelancers, to walk in and have a working system within 2 hours.

As the event was being broadcast live to Channel 4, Darren deployed one of Sound By Design’s DiGiCo D1s, which was chosen due to the number of outputs needed. Feeds of the umpire and playback groups were sent to the OB truck. Further feeds were also taken from the truck for the presenter microphones, used by Tony Hawkes & Jodie Kidd. More feeds were taken from the computer scoring system to allow the automatic “Klaxon”, signalling the end of a match, & rule-breaking buzzer to be sounded. Also in use was the 360 Systems “Instant Replay” hard-disk playback machine, which was perfectly suited to the task of the player’s music stings. Fast fingers were needed as the winning player's sting was to be played at the end of each match, and most matches came down to the final point!

All-in-all, a very successful day was had by all involved in this pioneering tennis event.

“Thank you for all your hard work and dedication at Betfair Turbo Tennis 2007 in The O2. You were an integral part of the event and we really appreciate your contribution to making the event a success.”