Officials of the Wycombe Wanderers’ Adams Park stadium in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England selected Bosch’s Praesensa public address and voice alarm system for its new safety system. The football club chose digital infrastructure design specialist and system integrator Landways to design, fund, and install this new system, alongside high-performance solutions for Wi-Fi and security, to help realize owner Rob Couhig’s ambitious vision for a great match day experience. 

Stadium officials selected the fully IP-based Praesensa system from Bosch to cover all public areas of the 10,000-capacity stadium. The system features a smart-power concept with integrated redundancies to save on energy, hardware, and space. Supporting the required intelligibility for voice evacuation, the system assures security for fans, complying with the requirements set by both the English Football League and the local council for ground safety and survivability in the event of an emergency. The system can broadcast pre-recorded messages from the system controller’s digital message storage, or live announcements from two Praesensa emergency call stations. 

The audio signals from Praesensa are fed into nine Dynacord MXE5 digital audio matrices via the built-in OMNEO IP architecture. This matches the benefits of a combined professional sound and public address system with the mandatory requirements for voice alarm systems to be fully compliant to the required standards. Functioning as a communications hub, the MXE5 supports all peripherals, with comprehensive supervision and monitoring of all system-wide commands. Seamless integration of all IP-based systems ensures that during an emergency, Praesensa messages are always ready to broadcast at the highest priority, with the entertainment audio automatically muted. The Praesensa system can be configured and controlled via the intuitive user interface.

“I am delighted that our new digital infrastructure is now fully in place and available for the benefit of everyone inside Adams Park,” said Rob Couhig, chairman of Wycombe Wanderers. “We are making a long-term investment in IP technology to improve the match-day experience, reduce costs, and help our business continue to thrive. It is great that the same underlying energy-efficient infrastructure that delivers our incredibly fast Wi-Fi can also be used to deliver high-quality stadium audio and new safety systems.”