Kay Yeager Coliseum first opened in 2003 and seats as many as 10,000 for events ranging from the local Wichita Falls Flyers FC of the US Arena Pro Soccer League to concerts, trade shows, conventions, hockey, basketball, arena football, Professional Bull Riding, tractor pulls, and more. With the venue’s original sound system surpassing two decades of service, its audio quality was clearly less than what contemporary events demand. Thanks to a new L-Acoustics A Series installation completed in February by Houston-based LD Systems, the sonic upgrade was quickly evident to everyone who heard it.
"Venue managers talk to each other all the time, about everything,” said Clay Stockton, assistant general manager for the City of Wichita Falls’ Multi-Purpose Events Center (MPEC), which includes the newly updated Kay Yeager Coliseum. “We talk about shows, we talk about technology. A colleague at another Texas venue told me about the L-Acoustics A Series sound system, and I’m glad we talked, because it’s been quite an amazing transformation.
“The sound was unlike anything I’d heard before. Since the A Series went in, we’ve had the Harlem Globetrotters here, boys and girls high school basketball games of the University Interscholastic League, and a Christian-music concert. For every event, people who had heard the previous sound system noted the huge improvement in sound quality now. Everyone just loves it!”
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The system, designed by LD Systems with input from the L-Acoustics Application team, features a distributed design, primarily comprising four-enclosure arrays of A15i and a pair of two-enclosure hangs in the end zones—a mixture of Wide and Focus, as needed in each location—backed by a dozen KS21i subs. These are supplemented by six coaxial X8 and two X12 used as a fills for shadowed areas. A combination of ten LA4X and two LA12X amplified controllers drive the entire setup.
“The room sounded pretty good on its own; the A15i speakers, though, were able to make it sound even better by making sure were able to provide coverage for every seat no matter what seating configuration they were using,” explained LD Systems engineering manager Anthony DiDonato. He notes that there were some rigging challenges in spots, but that A15i’s light weight and compact form factor easily overcame those.
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DiDonato added that municipal venues like the city owned MPEC are now joining private ones in seeking high impact and crisp speech intelligibility from their sound systems. “The number-one complaint about the previous system was that the clarity of spoken word just wasn’t there for events such as graduations,” he says. “The A15i system addressed both of those issues, offering impactful sound with great low-frequency reproduction for music, and excellent clarity for speech, to get fans involved for sports and make every word crystal-clear. A15i does it all.”
In fact, it does even more: DiDonato said the integration of a QSC Q-SYS control system allows the venue to turn speaker clusters on and off, as events’ acoustical and seating needs change, keeping sound where it’s wanted and away from where it’s not, avoiding undesired reflections and reverberation. “It can also drive an auto-mixer when they don’t need to fire up the Allen & Heath SQ-5 front-of-house console,” he said. “It’s a highly flexible system that gets them exactly what they need and at an affordable cost. That’s one in the ‘win’ column.”
