Tech Focus: Venue Sound, Part 1 - Designs Apply Lessons From Music Tours' Systems Impactful is new buzzword in stadium sound By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 - 7:00 am
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As with everything else in sports, COVID-19 rearranged venue sound: entirely new sound systems were designed and installed specifically to propagate the sound of artificial crowds, both onto the courts and playing fields and into the broadcasts, compensating for the lack of fans in the stands. It was a condition that persisted for well over a year, spanning most of 2020 and 2021. Now, as the seats are once again mostly filled, the focus has returned to what it takes to make a stadium or arena sound great.
A venue's signature sound, which is largely established well before its sound system is installed, comprises a combination of acoustical architecture and treatments. The sound system can either complement that combination or try to ignore it. The latter involves highly directed sonic energy that is tightly focused on seating areas and away from reflective surfaces, such as walls and floors, minimizing acoustical interactions with the venue's materials.
That's the way system design has trended for most of this century. However, the task is harder today than ever, given the increasingly extensive use of glass inside arenas and stadiums to cover suites and other discrete areas.
But it's a capability that high-end touring sound systems have achieved. These systems move from venue to venue and seek to avoid becoming part of each acoustical signature and to keep the music from the stage as uncolored as possible. That technical capability is being aggressively applied to sports venues.
L-Acoustics' Dan Palmer: The right kind of sound system can help drive business [beyond sports].
The intent is to excite the room as little as possible, so that the sound system can reproduce what it's intended to amplify as accurately and authentically as possible, explains Dan Palmer, business development manager, sports facilities, USA and Canada, L-Acoustics, whose portfolio includes the NFL Arizona Cardinals' State Farm Stadium and the NBA Philadelphia 76ers' and NHL Flyers' Wells Fargo Center. In addition to delivering concert-quality sound, the level of support that sports venues require now is also much higher. We've doubled down on that in terms of training, software modeling, and [system] calibrations.
Sports venues are paying more for high-end, tour-rider-ready sound systems, referring to the brands and models of systems demanded by top touring music artists and shows. But they're also able to promote those systems, particularly upper-level-installed speakers, as able to be used as seamless-delay extensions of a visiting touring system, reducing a tour's transport and rental costs.
The right kind of sound system can help drive business [beyond sports] for the venue and contribute to [the system's] ROI, says Palmer.
Schools Are Out Front College sports venues have tended to lead some industry trends in live sound, mainly because their youthful home audiences make their musical preferences clearly known. That has pushed the low end in systems, with hip-hop and other genres once known as urban becoming prominent.
But use of such systems clashes with the trend toward ever-larger scoreboards, and the growth in venue video makes it harder for sound to do the same. Integration of video and audio into the same unit has been a trend for some time, and form-factor consolidation helps optimize space for such large constructions.
However, video has been increasingly crowding out sound-system components. That's behind a design trend to extract more energy and ever lower bandwidth from smaller form factors. It's a conundrum that would cause head-scratching among physicists.
Scoreboards are getting larger to accommodate larger displays; however, the space allocated for loudspeakers is often becoming more restricted, confirms Stephen Siegel, president/CEO, Fulcrum Acoustic, adding that the company developed its AHS loudspeaker modules specifically to address that trend for scoreboard-mounted audio systems. At approximately 30 in. square x 28 in. deep, they can be more easily maneuvered within scoreboard structures.
Danley Sound Labs Mike Hedden Jr.: College venues are the three L's: louder, lower, and little.
College venues are the three L's: louder, lower, and little, observes Mike Hedden Jr., president/CEO, Danley Sound Labs, whose portfolio includes systems at the flagship stadiums at Arizona, Michigan, and Louisiana State, emphasizing the push to make form factors more compact. They want to play a Dua Lipa or The Weeknd or a Post Malone track and really feel it everywhere in the venue.
Marc Lopez, VP, marketing Americas, d&b audiotechnik, declares, Video is still king. The company's U.S. sports installations include Rice Stadium in Houston and the MLB Mariners' T-Mobile Park in Seattle. He notes that d&b has also developed a smaller-form-factor line to address scoreboard encroachment on audio's real estate in stadiums: the Y-Series or the new XSL system are internally referred to as light and loud.
Players Make Themselves Heard Although the venues themselves make final decisions regarding their sound, resident teams and even individual players are influencing those decisions. It's a trend clearly visible in basketball and, more recently, baseball, sports in which individual athletes are closely connected with music.
NBA players travel from arena to arena, notes Justo Gutierrez, director, AV and sound, sports and live events, Diversified. When they hear the newest sound system somewhere, they come back and compare that to what [their home arena has]
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Tech Focus: Venue Sound, Part 1 - Designs Apply Lessons From Music Tours' Systems Impactful is new buzzword in stadium sound By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
