As the Cincinnati Open undertook one of the largest venue expansions in professional tennis, the audio system needed to evolve alongside it. Working with ICS, the tournament deployed a campus-wide audio platform designed to support fans, players, staff, and broadcasters across one of the sport’s most ambitious facility upgrades.
The Spec:
🏢Venue: Cincinnati Open campus | Cincinnati, Ohio
👷Integrator: Carl Heck | Industrial Communication & Sound (ICS)
🎶Audio Spaces: World-class professional sports campus including courts, hospitality spaces, public common areas, indoor facilities, event spaces
🦈Products Used: CS84D, CS164D, CS168D, CS352D, CS354D, CS702D, CS704D, CS1504D
Held annually since 1899, the Cincinnati Open is the longest-running professional tennis tournament in the United States. Facing increasing global competition and rising expectations for professional sports facilities, it recently launched a massive $250 million campus transformation to establish the venue as a world-class benchmark for the tennis industry. The expansion more than doubled the facility’s footprint, adding new courts, hospitality spaces, public gathering areas, indoor facilities, and year-round attractions designed to secure the tournament’s future in Cincinnati for decades to come.
The expanded campus required a fully integrated network-based audio platform spanning 10 match courts, 21 practice courts, five new buildings, multiple renovated facilities, and several common areas. The system needed to support match court audio, site-wide paging, indoor and outdoor background music, broadcast audio distribution, Hawk-Eye officiating system integration, emergency paging, pre-recorded messaging, zoned and all-call communications, and centralized system-wide control. Beyond monitoring the system from a single location, the venue’s AV team required complete control over volume and routing for each zone across the property.
Venue staff contacted Carl Heck, Business Development Specialist at Industrial Communication & Sound (ICS), to design the new audio system. Compounding the challenge was the compressed timeline. The ICS integration team effectively had approximately five months to complete installation, testing, balancing, programming, and troubleshooting before the start of the tournament. To achieve all the client’s requirements, Heck recommended a Dante-based audio ecosystem powered by LEA Professional amplifiers.
“We started using LEA amplifiers about five years ago, and we haven’t looked back,” said Heck. “We knew they’d be an ideal platform for a world-class tournament environment, given their product catalog, combined with their competitive pricing and robust long-term reliability.”
To support the 54 zones across the expanded tennis complex, ICS deployed a range of Dante-enabled LEA Connect Series amplifiers, including the CS84D, CS164D, CS168D, CS352D, CS354D, CS702D, CS704D, and CS1504D. The variety of models allowed the team to match amplifier horsepower to the needs of each area throughout the venue, from match courts and public spaces to hospitality areas and back-of-house locations.
The scale of the project required an efficient deployment strategy. ICS’s team used LEA’s free SharkWare software to configure a base profile and push it to all pre-staged LEA amplifiers, reducing commissioning time while simplifying monitoring, diagnostics, and streamlining future system management even further with LEA Cloud remote amplifier control.
LEA’s compact single-rack-space designs also helped maximize available infrastructure by allowing amplifiers to be integrated directly into existing switch racks rather than requiring large dedicated amplifier racks. Combined with LEA’s per-channel Hi-Z and Lo-Z selectability, the system remained flexible enough to support a wide variety of speaker applications across the campus while reducing the amount of hardware required.
The resulting infrastructure allowed virtually any audio source to be routed to any zone throughout the facility. Multiple locations were also equipped to integrate live music directly into the Dante network for localized or zoned distribution as needed.
With year-round programming and a significantly enhanced fan experience, the facility has evolved into a multi-purpose sports and entertainment destination designed to maximize long-term return on investment while reinforcing Cincinnati’s role on the global tennis stage.
“By all accounts from the attendee experience, the player experience, and media response, the Cincinnati Open is now widely considered one of the premier tennis facilities in the world,” said Heck. “That’s definitely in part thanks to LEA amplifiers. We can’t say enough good things about them.”
The Conclusion
With its expanded campus now fully operational, the Cincinnati Open has established a new benchmark for tournament infrastructure. Backed by LEA amps and a unified networked audio platform, the venue is prepared to support players, fans, and future growth for years to come.
