A joint project of the International Coliseums Company (ICC) and the City of Youngstown, the 5700-seat Chevrolet Centre is home to the Central Hockey League's Youngstown Steelhounds, and has been designed as a multi-purpose facility that will host up to 100 events per season, including concerts, trade shows, conventions, sporting events, monster truck rallies, rodeos, family shows and potentially Arena Football and Indoor Soccer.
With such a wide diversity of programs, the facility demanded an audio system that would be both versatile and easily adaptable. "That was probably the biggest challenge," explains Richard Ridge of Burlington, Ontario-based White Radio. The company had been brought in by Randy Ricketts of Edcom Multimedia to design a system that could meet the facility's broad usage criteria. "The system needed to be flexible enough for the wide range ofevents they had planned, and user-friendly enough to allow quick and easy reconfiguration," Ridge adds. "They needed a system that could deliver both intelligibility and musicality, that would provide good coverage without sacrificing sound quality."
After spending several days doing Ease modeling of the venue, White Radio's Jerry Placken designed a system based around a custom version of Community's T-Class series loudspeakers, a three-way arrayable system with multiple pattern control options, augmented by several models of their R-Series weather-resistant horn loaded systems. "The Community boxes really met the challenge of maintaining good sonic performance and good pattern control over the full range of usage patterns the design called for," Placken remarks.
"The facility's management gave us a lot of feedback during the planning stages," Placken continues. "Probably their biggest criteria was a high level of intelligibility, as well as exceptional sound and musicality. They wanted to be as close to a home theatre experience as possible, to have the audience really feel involved in the event. The R-Series really fit the bill on both counts, as well as being compact enough to not detract from the sightlines."
The audio system utilizes the new NION (Networkable Input Output Node) system from Media Matrix, providing a scalable 32x32 CobraNet architecture with up to 96 audio channels. "They provided us with twelve major scenarios based on different types of events" Ridge explains. "Different scenes called for different zoning and coverage patterns, sometimes in only certain parts of the stands, for example. The NION afforded us a lot of flexibility in creating multiple, easily adaptable setups." Crest CKI amps power the system, utilizing their NexSys control system.
Ridge reports the installation went rather smoothly. "We had pre-wired most of the racks, which helped to streamline things, so we could spend our time on-site just attending to the final touches. Community were supportive above and beyond the call, sending Dave Howden down for a couple of days to fine tune the system. I'd say the biggest challenge was just finding enough quiet time to test the system in the midst of all the construction. We ended up doing most of it at night and on the weekends, when the noise was down to only a low roar."
(Chris Henry)
