The facility, which was extensively remodelled in 2008, benefits from solid acoustic design and good interior treatment. Even so, the sound during games was lacking until a recent sound-system upgrade featuring loudspeakers, power amplifiers and digital routing systems from Electro-Voice.
"The two main issues with the old system were lack of coverage and lack of intelligibility," says Tom Barrett, president of Ambient Sound in nearby Warwick, Rhode Island. Ambient handled installation and co-designed the system with Electro-Voice's technical services department, whose efforts were led by Robert Deyarmond. "Those games involve a lot of announcer play-by-play," Barrett continues, "but unless you were sitting right in front of one of the arrays, you were not going to understand what was being said. Also, the old system did not have any subwoofers, which is especially important for basketball, where there's a lot of pump-up music between plays."
Addressing these issues was clearly going to require loudspeakers with speech-range clarity and well-controlled coverage patterns. But the list of suitable systems was narrowed by the facility's requirements regarding placement, particularly a directive late in the design phase that no cabinet could hang lower than "low steel," which is the bottom of the ceiling's lowest horizontal member. "Permanently-hung cabinets below low steel might have interfered with the availability of rigging points for the concert systems that come in with touring shows," Barrett says. "And that might have made it difficult for them to avoid interfering with sight lines."
By limiting the vertical space available for arrays, the low-steel limitation made the size-to-power ratio of the boxes critical, and also placed a premium on loudspeakers that can achieve full performance even in arrays of very few boxes. Based on these requirements the design team selected distributed arrays using Electro-Voice EVH1152 two-way coaxial horn-loaded full-range loudspeakers.
"The choice of options available in the EVH1152 line is fantastic," Barrett says. "You can customize your coverage - 40 by 30, 60 by 40, 90 by 90 - by picking the right box, and you can also rotate the horns if you need to. Plus the rigging packages that are available for these boxes are engineered to work together in a multitude of environments. That made designing the system a lot easier, which was very valuable. And we didn't have to custom-fabricate any rigging; we were able to use all off-the-shelf components."
"These boxes were just the right size that we needed for this situation," adds Ambient production manager Mario Pregoni. "And we didn't require any fly grids; we could do all the rigging directly from the cabinets themselves with eye-bolts. That kept the weight down and helped us avoid extra height so we could keep the hangs low-profile."
(Jim Evans)
