CHESTNUT HILL, MASS-Boston College is known for its passionate sports fans, and being heard over the roar of the enthusiastic crowds at Boston College's Alumni Stadium is no mean feat. The 45,000-seat stadium recently completed a sound system renovation that included a new distributed audio system featuring Community speakers to get the announcements everywhere they need to be.
- The neighborhood around Boston College is very close to the stadium, and All Pro Sound minimized spillage by carefully aiming the Community speakers around the perimeter.
- "The WET and R-Series speakers are as durable and dependable as you can wish for, and that's the perfect fit for the harsh Boston winters," explained project manager Patrick Nunnally of Pensacola, FL-based All Pro Sound. The firm worked with acoustical consultants and system designers Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams (WJHW) of Dallas, TX to deliver the Alumni Stadium's new system.
- A Midas Venice 24 channel console handles mixing duties, and the system is powered by more than 50 Crown CTS-Series amplifiers loaded with Crown IQ DSP cards for control. The distributed system DSP is driven by MediaMatrix's new NION digital audio processing system. The system features three separate equipment locations strategically placed around the stadium with a fiber-optic backbone connecting all for complete head-end control and monitoring from the sound booth location. A custom GUI was built by All Pro Sound technical staff to allow the operator to quickly monitor all aspects of the system at any time.
- One of the major obstacles in updating the audio design was placement of new flagpoles to host some of the distributed system. The speakers needed to be raised to enable a more even distribution of sound between the front and back rows. "It was a bit of an engineering hurdle, but the results sound terrific," Nunnally said. "The Community speakers were the right choice for the job. They've got the power to cut through the ambient noise and deliver intelligibility to the crowd."
- The biggest hurdle to overcome was providing sound quality and speech intelligibility while minimizing spill over to the surrounding neighborhood. "The distributed system designed by Kevin Day of WJHW does an excellent job of providing coverage to the seating while keeping most of the energy in the stadium bowl where it needs to be," explained John Fuqua, director of All Pro Sound.
