Montana Grizzlies play to a Danley tune
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Until this year, staff set up a temporary PA system for every event. With design help from the engineering staff at Danley Sound Labs, both fields recently were upgraded with permanent, fully-weatherproof Danley OS-Series sound reinforcement systems. Now all meets, games, and even practices are full-fidelity, big-impact events with significantly elevated experiences for everyone involved.
“It was kind of a homemade sound system previously,” says Chuck Maes, associate athletic director for internal operations and the person who directed the upgrade for the university. “We had a couple of boxes that we could put up on the press box for track and field events or hang from the backstop for softball games. It was the same system we’d set up for tailgate parties and other small functions. Our softball field is only a few years old, and we’ve been building it out in stages
“Now that it has a permanent press box, we thought it was time to bring the sound quality up to what a facility like ours should be. At the same time, one of our two portable speakers used for track died, so it seemed like a good time to upgrade the track and field experience as well.”
According to Maes, the success of the recent Danley installation at the school's Washington Grizzly football stadium (capacity 25,217), led them to conclude that, "Danley was the logical choice when we looked at upgrading the softball and track venue". Maes and colleagues also installed two Danley point source loudspeakers and subwoofers in the new Washington-Grizzly Champions Centre. One system was installed in their new strength & conditioning centre and the other was installed in their new 6,500 square-foot football locker room.
The designs at both fields are quite similar and involve three Danley OS80 loudspeakers splayed to give left-centre-right coverage and two Danley OS115 subwoofers for deep low-end support. Repurposed Crown amplifiers power the boxes, and each system uses a new Danley SC48 DSP for input conditioning, loudspeaker conditioning, and protection. The softball system sits on top of a custom-built 10ft structure on top of the press box, which allows a camera crew to film the game from below, and the coverage is fantastic, with each OS80’s pattern knitting perfectly with the adjacent boxes.
(Jim Evans)
