Case Study  |  VfL Wolfsburg  |  Frangioni Media

By David Frangioni | Frangioni Media  |  Photos: stills from Monster’s Pure Monster Sound film.

For the 2017/18 Bundesliga season, VfL Wolfsburg wanted the Volkswagen Arena to sound like no other stadium. David Frangioni designed the sound system and implemented Pure Monster Sound with Monster founder Noel Lee. The club called it the best sound they had ever heard.

The Short Answer

When Monster became VfL Wolfsburg’s official and exclusive acoustics partner, the club’s home ground, the 30,000-capacity Volkswagen Arena, received a new stadium sound system in time for the season opener against Borussia Dortmund on August 19, 2017, as VfL Wolfsburg announced. David Frangioni designed the system and worked alongside Noel Lee, Monster’s founder and “Head Monster,” to implement Pure Monster Sound across the bowl.

The goal was simple to say and hard to do: hi-fi clarity in every seat of an open-air football stadium.

The Challenge

Stadiums are hostile places for sound. Distances are huge, reflections come back off the stands and roof, and most systems sound good only near the front while the far seats get a smeared, unintelligible version. Noel Lee described the problems plainly to What Hi-Fi: poor dispersion around the stadium, multiple systems interfering with each other and slap-back echo from the far walls.

The design brief was the opposite of a typical public address system. Every supporter, home and away, in every section, should hear the same articulate, balanced sound, with bass that can really hit on a goal and never turns to mud.

What Was Designed

• Full-bowl coverage. 147 loudspeaker cabinets and the Monster Cube, distributed so each section is covered directly instead of relying on a few loud clusters.
• Arrays and subwoofers working as one system. What Hi-Fi counted 50 subwoofers and as many speaker arrays, each tuned individually.
• Tuned to audiophile standards. Pure Monster Sound was implemented across the system, which Lee called “the biggest audio system in the world, tuned by an audio engineer to audiophile standards.”
• Designed for matchday. The system was built around stadium sound and a full crowd, and worked alongside the arena’s pre-match light show.

Watch: Pure Monster Sound at the Volkswagen Arena

Monster filmed the project from the rigging to matchday. Noel Lee explains the thinking behind the system, and the footage shows the arrays going up beneath the roof and the tuning from the stands.

The best sound they had ever heard.

VfL Wolfsburg, on the finished system

The Result

VfL Wolfsburg’s managing director said the partnership allowed the club to be the first to offer a unique acoustic experience in its stadium. When What Hi-Fi visited for a match against Borussia Mönchengladbach, the writer reported that the slap-back echo was “next-to inaudible” and described “a startling level of clarity unrivalled by the often quite unintelligible PA systems we’ve faced on many an away-day.”

The client’s verdict was more direct. They told David it was the best sound they had ever heard.

David Frangioni’s Role: Collaboration That Moves Audio Forward

Wolfsburg came out of a relationship that goes back roughly three decades. David Frangioni has worked with Monster and the Lee family for most of his career, and he and Noel Lee share one conviction: music should sound the way the artist meant it to, whether the room holds two people or thirty thousand.

That shared conviction is what made the Volkswagen Arena an innovation and not just an installation. Stadium systems have traditionally been specified for coverage and volume. David approached the bowl the way he approaches a recording studio or a reference theater, as a listening room, and designed the system so a recognizable sound signature could be carried into every section. Noel brought Monster’s Pure Monster Sound voicing. David brought the system design and the studio discipline to make that voicing hold up at stadium scale.

Where that work lives today

The same approach now runs through David’s companies. Frangioni Media designs and builds stadium and arena sound, team production studios, premium suites and athlete home theaters for clients worldwide. Modern Drummer, which David owns, keeps him working every day with the musicians and recordings that set the standard for how great sound should feel. And his Dolby Atmos work for legendary artists keeps his ears tuned to the newest formats teams now publish in.

For a team, that combination means one person who has designed sound for a Bundesliga stadium, built studios for recording artists and mixed in immersive formats, and who can carry one standard from the stands to the studio to the stream.

What It Means for Teams Building Studios

Sound is the part fans feel

Picture gets the budget. Sound gets the emotion. A team that invests in a world-class matchday sound standard should hold its studios, podcast rooms and broadcast audio to the same standard, so the club sounds the same on every screen as it does in the stands.

Design for every seat, and every listener

The Wolfsburg system was designed for the far corner as carefully as the center line. A team content operation needs the same thinking: mixes that translate on a phone speaker, in earbuds, on a living-room system and in an Atmos room.

One designer, start to finish

Great stadium sound comes from one clear design intent carried through placement, tuning and commissioning. That is the same reason a team studio needs one accountable lead. It is what Frangioni Media delivers in the Team Studio program, and what David did for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park.

David tells the story in his own words in the best sound they had ever heard: designing stadium sound for VfL Wolfsburg.

Frequently Asked Questions

David Frangioni