When the dust finally settled, U of U's largest sporting and entertainment venue featured two new grand entrances plus a new floor, drapes, LED lighting system and versatile house sound system comprised of L-Acoustics' powerful Kara and high-directivity ARCS WiFo enclosures.
The audio portion of the project represented a joint effort between two Salt Lake City businesses: acoustician and technology consulting firm Spectrum Engineers, who provided the design and construction documents, and systems integration company Poll Sound, who installed the system and assisted with product specific design.
According to Poll Sound's Deward Timothy, the first order of business with the renovation project involved the removal of the venue's heavy steel and concrete cloud. "The Huntsman Centre had a very large structural cloud that maxed out the weight limit on the roof and was not suitable for hanging technical lighting or sound, which made the venue unsuitable for concerts," he notes. "The idea with the remodel was to have the space divisible with a curtain system to create various sized smaller rooms, and to replace the cloud with a lighter weight 'super grid' that could accommodate concert technical systems. Since the room would now be divided, it was important in the sound system design that it be able to support each section individually; in other words, coverage in the unused areas could be turned off at will."
Using L-Acoustics' Soundvision acoustical modelling software, the two firms collaborated on the design of a new loudspeaker setup to replace the arena's previous vintage centre cluster system, which had issues with hot spots and low intelligibility in many areas.
Installed late last year, the new system features two concentric rings of loudspeakers: eight main arrays of eight Kara flown beneath two SB18i subs addressing the lower bowl seating areas, and 16 delay arrays of three ARCS Focus enclosures collectively delivering a razor-sharp 45 degrees of coverage to the upper bowl seats.
Four arrays of three ARCS Wide mounted under the scoreboard each provide a tightly focused 90-degree pattern to the basketball floor. All loudspeakers are powered and processed by a combination of seven LA8 and 21 LA4X amplified controllers housed in racks on a platform near the top of the dome with fibre runs to the mix position where a computer running L-Acoustics' LA Network Manager monitoring and control software is located.
(Jim Evans)
