Kingston, RI--The Ryan Center, a $54 million, 7,500 seat multi-purpose arena on the grounds of the University of Rhode Island, is home to a variety of events including family entertainment, concerts, sports competitions, conventions, and a host of other community affairs. Recently, the Ryan Center upgraded its sound system with the help of QSC Audio.
Growing concerns with the intelligibility and the overall aesthetics of the venue’s P.A. system led the Center to hire AV system consultant, North American Theatrix, to analyze the state of the system. In reviewing the existing installation, NAT determined that a physical re-arrangement of the existing clusters would cost approximately 1/3 of an all-new cluster, not including additional necessary components. However, the manufacturer of that system was not actively supporting this equipment, so replacements would have to be ordered as custom-built product. Not finding this to be an acceptable solution, NAT recommended an all-new system upgrade.
- The design and integration of the new QSC system was handled by the NAT team of Gary Peck, Jeff Mele and Keith Book.
- “The inherent challenge of the venue was that the intelligibility was very poor,” Mele said.
The NAT team recommended the complete system upgrade, integrating QSC Wideline-8 Line Arrays, ADS52T speakers for the concourse zones and a QSC Q-SYS system for redundancy and overall system control. Existing QSC CX Series amplifiers were also integrated into the new system.
“QSC is one of the most reliable manufacturers we work with,” said Mele. “They always do their homework to fill the void by asking questions of the proper sources.”
“There were around 50 very large boxes hanging 60 feet over the gym floor which hung from wire rope and threaded rod, some of which stretched 80 feet to the roof ceiling. We used a 120-foot Genie lift to reach these heights and chain motors to drop them. Once the existing boxes were removed, the transition was easy and the new system was completed in about 4 days,” Peck said. “The result of this change was both improved audio as well as better aesthetics and sightlines.”
“We wanted to replace the digital signal processing with a more suitable configuration for the line array program with 100 percent redundancy for the primary arena speakers, while still satisfying the requirements for secondary evacuation annunciation,” Book said. “This new system has the horsepower to control all the ancillary systems throughout the building.”
With the installation complete, the Ryan Center staff was extremely pleased and the completed system surpassed their expectations.
