The Tweeter Center is a 19,900-seat outdoor venue with a covered, roofed section of about 7,500 seats with the balance in an open seating area. A wall at the back of the seating area separates it from the community. The new sound reinforcement system to serve the lawn area was designed and installed by Pro Sound Service, a 16-year-old firm that has been providing repair and maintenance on the venue's existing system for 10 years.
Until installation of the new system, there had been an ongoing noise-complaint issue from the neighbourhood located behind the back wall of the facility. A 16-foot high wall barrier had been erected to alleviate noise complaints after the town established a maximum allowable sound pressure level of 95 dB SPL at the back wall. Sound levels are continuously monitored.
"During the system installation and commissioning," said Charles Tappa, Pro Sound Service president, "We found that we were able to measure a full 10 dB difference between the measurement mics at the top of the wall and the SPL at ground level. This, we absolutely attribute to the tight vertical pattern control of the Vertec line array system."
The final design specified that each of four existing cluster locations would contain five VT4888 enclosures, with two additional locations each housing VRX932LA compact constant-curvature line arrays and a single AM6212/95 cabinet as "fringe fill." Additionally, the system included 11 Crown I-Tech 4000 amplifiers and 10 I-Tech 8000's, with two dbx 2231 dual 31-band graphic equalisers.
(Jim Evans)
