Adlib Audio
Turf Moor Stadium Speaker Frames
THE MECHANICAL DESIGN
Adlib specialise in installing audio equipment, but this stadium install was their first at this scale — and it had to be right. We were brought in to handle the structural side end-to-end: design, drafting, and manufacture support for a full set of speaker support frames, so Adlib's team could focus on the audio install itself.
The Challenge
The stadium's four stands each called for a slightly different frame design, driven by the geometry and structure at each location. The heaviest speaker and frame had a combined mass of 300kg and with this load being hung above a crowd it was incredibly important to be thorough and vigilant with our structural calculations and connection designs.
Getting the speaker aimed correctly matters as much as getting it hung safely, and speaker pitch can't always be nailed down on paper before the frame is on site. We designed the frames so the pitch of each speaker could be fine-tuned on site simply by twisting a turnbuckle — giving the install team control over aim without needing to re-engineer or re-fabricate anything once the frame was up.
Wind loading was a major driver throughout. Burnley sits in one of the windiest parts of the country, and a stadium roof structure amplifies that further. Every frame and connection was checked against realistic wind load cases, not just the static weight of the equipment — because the loads that matter on a project like this are rarely the ones you'd first assume.
Not every speaker position sat neatly under the stadium's overhead steelwork either. Where positions fell off the existing structure, we designed secondary bridging steelwork to carry the load back to a suitable connection point — engineered and detailed with the same rigour as the primary frames.
On-Site Support
Things go wrong on site, as they always do on a project of this scale. When issues came up, we turned around solutions quickly rather than letting them stall the install. Beyond the initial design, we stayed engaged through the build — answering the site team's queries directly and providing engineering sign-off on decisions made in real time on site, so work didn't have to stop and wait.
Hand calculations were used throughout for critical components like the support stools, giving Adlib's team a clear, checkable basis for every connection — not just a black-box output.
Why It Worked
Projects like this draw on more than one calculation. It's knowledge built from previous tricky installs — working at height, rigging practicalities, how structures actually behave once real people and real weather get involved. That background is what let us move fast when problems came up on site, and design with the right margins from the start rather than after something went wrong.
The result: a fully engineered speaker frame system across a live stadium environment, delivered to a first-time client at scale, with safety and redundancy built in from the ground up.
The install also had a hard deadline that couldn't move — the football season was starting, and every team needed to be off site before the first match. We hit it, on time, with the frames signed off and ready before a ball was kicked.
"Thanks once again for all your (& your team’s) help on this, and delivering everything so very quickly and accurately. It can’t have been easy with the ever-moving goalposts that kept showing up, but it was really great to have you on board. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would have been had we not had you lot on the case!"
George Puttock - Adblib