Ohio Stadium Kicks Off New Season with Meyer Sound
| |||||||
| IMAGES
|
As part of a three-year renovation which will ultimately add a number of innovative new technologies and some 9,000 seats to Ohio State University's Ohio Stadium, an audio system comprised of 23 Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers promises to rock every seat in the house with a level of intelligibility and sonic accuracy never before heard in the 78 year-old venue. Working from a design penned by Dallas-based Wrightson Johnson Haddon & Williams (WJHW), Pro Sound, Inc., a systems integration firm with offices in both Miami and Las Vegas, brought the system to life this year just in time for the fall football season. Making up the stadium's main array are eight Meyer Sound SB-1 Sound Beams, eight MSL-6s and seven MSL-4s. All are housed in a mammoth 30-ft.x 30-ft. enclosure built in the shape of the OSU logo which is mounted 160 feet in the air atop a Saco SmartVision LED video display. With a distance of 1,000 feet from the closest person served by the array to the most distant, it comes as no surprise when WJHW associate Gary White related that "the hardest thing to deal with as sound designers on this project was the sheer size of the stadium." In resolving the dilemma, White and the rest of the design team drew upon the success of another WJHW project undertaken at Tampa Bay's Raymond James Stadium. Representing the first large sports facility to ever use self-powered loudspeakers in a main array, Raymond James Stadium is outfitted with a comprehensive Meyer Sound system, the success of which duly inspired the Ohio Stadium project. According to White, the Meyer SB-1 is the only product he knows of which can project a beam of sound for a distance of 1,000 feet while still providing exceptional sound quality and intelligibility. Unlike the SPL levels produced by more traditional horn-loaded devices, which decrease approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance, the SB-1 parabolic reflector design propagates sound waves that decrease as little as 3 dB SPL per doubling of distance for more than 300 feet, across a five-octave frequency range, all with a consistent and narrow beam width. "That translates into performance which is virtually unparalleled within the industry," he adds. "And, because the main arrays are self-powered, we eliminated the need for wiring individual processors as well as long cable runs to amplifiers, all while drastically reducing the overall installation time. Based upon these attributes alone, it's my feeling that the system here at Ohio Stadium will leave many footsteps for others to follow in the future." October, 2000 |
FEATURED PRODUCTS |
