USA - Choctaw Casino & Resort – Durant, located in Oklahoma 80 miles north of Dallas, TX, is an entertainment destination, operated by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The 1,700-room complex features an expansive gaming floor and a broad range of amenities including a spa, pools, six movie theatres and more than 20 restaurants.
Choctaw’s 3,000-seat Grand Theatre, a two-time winner of the Academy of Country Music (ACM) award for Casino of the Year – Theatre, is dedicated to bringing fans the best live entertainment experiences in Oklahoma and North Texas. To that end, the venue, a longtime Meyer Sound house, recently upgraded to a Panther large-format linear line array loudspeaker system.
Choctaw Casino & Resort and Live Nation recently inked a partnership deal to bring the biggest names in entertainment to the Grand Theatre. “We work with some of the biggest names in entertainment and giving them the best sound experience is something they’ve come to expect,” says Frank Deal, assistant casino manager at Choctaw Casino & Resort – Durant. “By upgrading to the Panther system, our sound system rivals that of larger venues, and with the new system, we can elevate the concert experience even more.”
The theatre housed a Meyer Sound LEO linear line array loudspeaker system for nearly a decade. “It still sounded great; nothing was wrong with it,” Deal explains. “To give our guests and artists the best concert experience in southeast Oklahoma and North Texas and to stay in the forefront of the industry, we knew it was time to update and upgrade.”
To elevate audio capabilities to the current state of the art, the venue again turned to Meyer Sound. “We have a great deal of confidence in Meyer and its products, and the whole design philosophy and production manufacturing philosophy,” says Robin Magruder, co-owner of Dallas-based integrator Crossroads Audio, which specified and installed the system. “And, the fact that Meyer Sound loudspeakers are designed and built here in the U.S. is an advantage to a lot of end users,” adds Crossroads Audio co-owner Ed Spoto, “especially in this market, since a lot of the casinos we work with are Native American.”
The system at the Choctaw Grand comprises 10 narrow-coverage and four wide-coverage Panther loudspeakers per side and twelve 2100‑LFC low-frequency control elements in a central gradient array, supplemented by 10 Leopard‑M80 out-fills per side and eight Leopard front-fills as well as two ULTRA‑X42 loudspeakers for extra out-fills; stage monitors comprise products from the MJF range. The system is managed by Galileo Galaxy 816 and 408 processors.
“We were very pleased with the way that the system sounded right out of the box,” says Spoto, adding that when they aligned the system with Meyer Sound’s product management team, they were able to dial in extremely consistent coverage — within one-and-a-half dB — throughout the entire venue. “I was very pleased that we were able to get all the seats sounding identical; it was a much better end result than we could have ever hoped for on paper.”
“Casinos have become a major segment of the tour market,” says Spoto. “They’ve had to go from ‘good enough’ systems to tour grade. And this is a tour-grade system like you would find in any arena in the country.”
