On the heels of Florida Atlantic University’s elevation to Division I-A football and its record-setting win at the New Orleans Bowl, the Owls opened the 2011 season in a brand new, 30,000-seat stadium on the school’s main Boca Raton campus.
The facility features clean sightlines, comfortable amenities, and multiple grades of profitable priority seating. The design will accommodate 65,000 additional seats and a roof if needed. Given the project’s tight budget, initial plans called for a bare-bones public address system, but system consultant Anthony James Partners alerted the school to the remarkably affordable, high-performance Danley Sound Labs Jericho Horn JH-90. Two Jericho Horn JH-90s fire from the scoreboard to cover the entire stadium with full-frequency, eminently-intelligible audio.
“The budget was a real challenge,” said Larry Lucas, director of audio engineering at Anthony James Partners. “They were set to compromise on the audio system, but we suggested they listen to a Danley Jericho Horn JH-90. After our demo, they realized that for only a little bit more money, they could get a high-fidelity, high-volume sound system capable of supporting concerts and functions, in addition to great-sounding game day content.”
“Where other manufacturers use a conventional design – which has a host of inherent acoustical limitations – and then add costly and imperfect ‘fixes’ to deal with those limitations, Danley starts with an unconventional design with solid acoustical performance,” said Lucas. “By combining fifteen drivers into a single point-source enclosure, the Jericho JH-90 is powerful but acoustically clean and simple. As a result, I don’t have to fight with phasing and timing issues in the design. I’m not fighting physics.”
Daktronics installed the audio system, as well as a Daktronics scoreboard. “At Daktronics, working to accurately integrate sound systems into video board structures is a critical engineering objective,” said Mike Maloney, regional audio sales associate with Daktronics. “Normally Daktronics supplies a cabinet with a speaker-covering mesh for a university, but the JH-90s at FAU needed to attach directly to the top of the video board. To satisfy the mounting requirements, our mechanical engineers designed custom mounts to hold the JH-90s safely atop the new video board. The mounts meet strict safety standards while providing tilting capabilities so as to optimize coverage at the opposite end zone.”
The coverage patterns of the two Jericho Horn JH-90s blanket the entire bowl of the new stadium, save for a few seats directly below the scoreboard. Daktronics installed two flagship Danley SH-50 full-range loudspeakers to provide the requisite fill.
Ten Crown I-Tech 5000 HD amplifiers provide power to the system, with processing handled by BSS London. “The Jericho JH-90s required only some modest equalization to be dialed in completely,” said Maloney. “At the base of the system, a Yamaha 01V 96 VCM digital mixer gives the FAU audio techs control over inputs and volume. HiQnet System Architect software gives us real-time information regarding the amplifier and speaker performances.”
