The stadium's original design dates from the 1960s, and while it's not all that out of the ordinary, it presented a few logistical challenges that led James Bush, the venue's production manager, to opt for the single-source approach, where the entire system resides around the scoreboard. "The stadium's got a clubhouse facility that's about ten stories high on one side, and lower on the other," Bush explains. "Finding the right locations for a traditional distributed system would have been a heck of a challenge, and it would've ended up being cost prohibitive."
It was equally clear early on that nothing from the stadium's existing sound system would play a part in the renovation. "We had a whole amalgamation of previous systems working more or less together - sometimes more, but more often less," Bush remarks. "For the most part, it amounted to a bandage where a tourniquet was needed. We ended up gutting the whole thing. It was good to have the opportunity to put in one manageable system."
Rather than fight his way through trying to make a distributed system work, Bush opted for the somewhat unconventional approach of installing a line array system. The choice of an installed line array at only one end of the field was met with at least some degree of skepticism. "I wasn't aware that no one had really done a line array as a permanent installation in a stadium before," says Bush. "I'd seen them in concerts all the time and it never even crossed my mind that no one would have tried it (in a stadium). We've got a big DiamondVision screen at the north end of the field, and it just made sense to stick one (array) to the left (of the screen) and one to the right. I wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel or anything."
The arrays on either side of the screen each consist of five Milo cabinets with one Milo 60 high-power narrow coverage curvilinear array loudspeaker underhung to cover the areas closer to the array. A primary challenge in single-source systems is providing intelligible sound all the way across the length of the venue. However, Bush knew that Meyer Sound made the unique SB-1 parabolic long-throw sound beam specifically for this purpose. The SB-1 delivers a narrow, focused beam of highly intelligible sound covering nearly a five-octave frequency range further than 300 feet. Texas Tech's stadium uses two SB-1 cabinets to provide coverage to the far end of the field.
"It's a pretty long throw - some 280 feet - to the other end of the field, and the SB-1 came to mind as the ideal complement to the Milo array," Bush remarks. He also specified four UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers to cover the near-field seats. "Those seats are about 25 feet up in the air, so we put the UPAs down close for near fills."
Another priority in planning the new system was to have all system components equipped with Meyer Sound's RMS Remote Monitoring System to make it easy to keep an eye on the system's status in real time. "That's one issue we'd been snake-bitten by in the past," Bush recounts. "It's pretty remote up there at the top of the stands by the PA sound booth, and when one of the speakers cracked back into whine mode, we didn't notice it right away. Needless to say, we got a different kind of feedback later on after the game. So I really wan
