The farthest reaches of any stadium are difficult to cover with clear, impactful, intelligible sound—even under the best of circumstances. Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the Atlanta Falcons football team and host of this year's Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams, features a challenging upper bowl devoid of acoustic treatments.
Nevertheless, a total of 58 Danley Sound Labs’ point-source SH96 Synergy Horn loudspeakers rocked the upper bowl with Danley’s characteristic fidelity and cliff-edge pattern control. In addition, VIPs enjoyed the musicality of sixty Danley GO-2-8CX loudspeakers installed in the luxury suites overlooking the game. For the last 22 years, national AV integration and production firm ATK Audiotek handled all of the sound for this annual event.
“We’ve been doing this for so many years that we are very comfortable with how our on-field carts and temporary loudspeakers will perform,” said Kirk Powell, sound designer, ATK Audiotek. “The wild card is always the house sound system. We don’t want to attempt covering all the way to the top of the bowl from the field because we’d get a lot of spillover and reflections back from the roof and upper bowl walls."
"This year, Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s Danley SH96s picked up beautifully where our systems left off," he added. "I didn’t expect anything less, because I know that Danley makes really good products. We had a couple of days before the game to tune everything up so that the delays were perfect and that the tonality of both systems meshed naturally.”
ATK Audiotek worked closely with Baker Audio, the regional AV integration firm that installed the Danley system at Mercedes-Benz stadium.