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Sud de France Arena, Montpellier

A powerful sound system to entertain 14,ooo people

The Sud de France Arena in Montpellier marked its 15th anniversary with a night of electronic music for a 14,000-capacity room. The brief was demanding: even, powerful coverage across the whole arena, with no visual bulk getting in the way. Tribal Sound answered it with Europe's largest ever X-Line Advance X2 deployment.

Case Study
Stadium / Arena
Electro-Voice
Dynacord
Europe
Dante
2025-DC-EV-Sud-de-France-Arena_01
Venue
Sud de France Arena
Location
Montpellier, France
Install partner
Tribal Sound
Product highlights
Electro-Voice X-Line Advance X2, PREVIEW · Dynacord TGX, SONICUE
The venue

An anniversary night that had to fill a 14,000-seat arena

The Sud de France Arena had its 15th anniversary called for a celebration to match. The headline was electronic music — a genre that lives and dies on full-range coverage and massive low end across every seat.

Local rental company Tribal Sound had a clear constraint to work within. The arena needed even coverage to every corner and serious output, yet the system could not dominate the sightlines of a room built for big audiences.

"We built the system by using EV’s PREVIEW software and saw that to cover the whole venue properly we would need to dry hire some more X2 and subs."
Julien GarciaCEO, Tribal Sound
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The challenge

Delivering massive SPL with no dead zones in a large venue

Electronic music demands consistent level and intelligibility from the front rail to the back of the bowl. For a 14,000-capacity arena, that means a system with the reach to hit every area without straining.

Tribal Sound modeled the deployment in Electro-Voice PREVIEW before a single box went up. The model showed the venue would need more X2 cabinets and subwoofers than were in stock, so the company dry-hired additional units from another local rental firm to complete the design.

  • A 14,000-capacity arena to cover end to end

  • Electronic music with demanding low-frequency content

  • Even coverage without pushing the system too hard

  • A compact footprint that stays out of the sightlines

The solution

Europe's largest X-Line Advance line array deployment, powered by TGX amps

Tribal Sound deployed 60 Electro-Voice X-Line Advance X2 loudspeaker elements — 48 X2-212 cabinets across the main hangs and 12 as outfills — alongside 24 X2-128 and 24 X12-128 subwoofers. MFX-15 coax wedges handled front fill and DJ monitoring, with PX2181 subwoofers at the DJ booth.

Power and processing came from 19 high-end Dynacord TGX amplifiers for live sound applications: 10 TGX10 and 9 TGX20 amps, all set up and controlled with SONICUE Sound System Software. During setup, SONICUE flagged a cabling fault before it could become a problem on the night.

“The X2 is a discreet system with great sound quality. It provided the power of a big system but without taking up the space. The arena team were extremely impressed with the sound quality and coverage coming out of the small form factor of the X2.”

Julien GarciaCEO, Tribal Sound
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The result

The room sounded exactly as the model predicted

With the system flown and tested, the measured result matched the PREVIEW model — full coverage across the arena with headroom to spare. The compact X2 cabinets delivered the output of a far larger rig without taking up the space.

The anniversary night went off cleanly, and the response bore it out. Garcia reported compliments from across the room, with the design carrying speech and music to every area of the 14,000-seat venue.

  • Equipment exactly measured and matched to the space thanks to PREVIEW prediction software

  • Full-arena coverage with enough headroom for highest SPL levels

  • Big output from a compact rig

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