The University of Louisville’s Papa John’s stadium, home of the Cardinals football team, had a problem with uneven coverage, and it had nothing to do with defensive cornerbacks leaving the opposing team’s wide receivers open for a “Hail Mary” touchdown pass.
“Week in and week out, they’d get complaints that ‘This seat was too loud’ or ‘In this seat we couldn’t hear,’” says Mike Dewees, owner and president of Acoustical Audio Designs (AAD), the integrators who worked with PMK Consultants on the audio system that was part of a expansion of the stadium, which also boosted its seating capacity of 55,000.
Undertaken by Louisville based architects Luckett and Farley, and first begun in late 2008, the $72 million expansion was completed just prior to the Cardinals’ 2010 season opener — not long after Charlie Strong was hired as head coach. Although the project involved a comprehensive overhaul of the stadium’s AV systems, the driving force behind it was to increase the stadium’s capacity and patron amenities.
Along with the addition of 1,725 club seats and 13,000 regular seats, there are 33 new private suites, a new Cardinal Authentic store and the Norton Healthcare Terrace, which overlooks the field from above the south-end stands and connects the east and west sides of the stadium.
Getting an Earful
The bowl’s new sound system, Dewees explains, is actually a replacement of a replacement system, and one that never entirely met the client’s needs. (It was installed when much of the original audio infrastructure was displaced by the addition of a large video screen at the stadium’s north end.)
“The far end of the bowl required pretty high SPL,” Dewees notes. “So, when you got the system loud enough to hear at that end, the people up front complained and the school really wanted to address that.”
Designed by Dallas-based PMK Consultants, the new audio system incorporates over 400 Tannoy loudspeakers, providing reinforcement of music, speech and a variety of program material in the bowl and throughout many of the stadium’s new interior spaces.
Comprised largely of Tannoy’s VQNET 40 MH loudspeakers, the main bowl system now allows operators greater control and provides more even coverage to all areas of the bowl, new and old. Even so, after its first use, the new audio system required additional optimization. Those problems had to be addressed after the first game.
“We just ran out of time,” admits Thad Packard, PMK’s project manager. “This sometimes happens during commissioning when we are not made aware of all the other things that will be happening in the venue. So, we decided to focus on the main bowl. Unfortunately, this left some dead spots on the new terrace and in the new upper deck. But after we were able to get back to the venue between the first and second game, we finalized the settings and provided excellent coverage in all areas.”
“The mechanical time alignment and the form factor of the Tannoy VQNETs makes for less tweaking overall, and the low amount of horn interaction is impressive,” says Derek Black, Eastern regional rep for Tannoy in North America. “At the end of the day, however, we are all governed by some basic physics and acoustic rules, and the limitations of ‘free space’ outdoor venues present legitimate hurdles to overcome, especially with an end zone shot design.”
Members of the athletic department closely involved in the construction are forthright in their assessment of the problems inherent in providing sound reinforcement throughout the venue, saying that they could only be completely addressed by a distributed system that was deemed too costly in the early stages of the project. They add, however, that the sound quality and coverage in the stadium bowl with the new Tannoy heavy system is of a decidedly higher quality than previously was the case.
There are often issues in a venue of this nature, Dewees puts in. “On a hot, windy day with crowd noise, there are some areas that are a little light.” But, he adds, since PMK’s design was implemented and the final tuning completed, the complaints have stopped.
A Long History
If anyone has an intimate understanding of the sonic issues at Papa John’s, it’s Dewees. “In addition to installing the new system, we’re also contracted to operate it for every event and game here,” he says.
His work at the facility actually dates back to 1998, when the stadium first opened, and Dewees’ company — then acting as the install division of Far Out Music, a pro MI store in nearby Jeffersonville, IN — were hired to install the venue’s original system.
Since incorporating in the mid-2000s, AAD has remained a relatively small company, specializing in A/V presentation format design/installs for churches, schools and corporate clients in the Louisville area, as well as a variety of international clients whose projects have required installs in Mexico, California and Chicago.
Since the stadium was originally built, a distributed system was discussed, he continues, but, although it would have better solution than an end zone cluster, it has never been implemented.
Initially, the biggest issue was where to place the speakers. “There really isn’t a good place to mount speakers around the bowl to get a proper distributed system. When the renovation got started the owners were looking for a substantial improvement in the audio system, and when they discussed this with PMK, a distributed system was brought up.”
“A distributed system is always PMK’s first approach whenever it is feasible,” says Packard. “Such was the case here, but then there was a round of budget reductions. Everything was cut back, so the distributed system was no longer feasible.”
“PMK then proposed an end zone cluster system at the south end of the stadium because it would be higher than the existing location at the north end, and we knew it would minimize annoying reflections.” After pricing the alternate solution, however, it was found that the additional steel required for building the location for the loudspeakers made it financially impossible.
At that point, the design was altered again, reworked to depend heavily on a cluster of loudspeakers placed above the video wall/scoreboard at the U-shaped stadium’s open end. “The Tannoys were chosen,” Dewees says, “primarily because we needed to hit some seats that were almost in another zip code. We also had somewhat limited space to fit the system in.”
“The Tannoy VQ series would have performed excellently in any of the scenarios,” Packard says. “The consistency of dispersion over frequency minimizes the size of the interference zone where loudspeaker patterns overlap because you don’t have to worry so much about high frequency coverage. Many loudspeakers have coverage patterns that significantly decrease as frequency increases. So, in order to achieve adequate coverage at 4 kHz, for example, the patterns have to overlap greatly at 1 kHz. This overlap causes interference, which results in greater inconsistency in level from seat to seat.”
A Long Throw
It’s a challenge in any stadium employing an end zone cluster, he continues. “The longer you throw the more important that is. We had a really long throw, so the tighter the pattern the better… And when the loudspeakers are arrayed together it’s easier to control the level in a specific area.”
He stresses that PMK always prefers to use a loudspeaker with good pattern control as long as it also has good sound quality, as the Tannoy VQs do. In this case, that consideration was even more important given the location they ultimately were required to use.
“The loudspeaker cluster location is slightly lower than the top of the bowl, and much lower than the new east side upper deck. Knowing that it would be difficult to achieve even coverage and impossible to avoid echoes from such a location, we chose to make all other aspects of the sound system as good as we could. Not only are the VQs consistent in beam width and accurate in frequency response, but also they are priced competitively.”
Black agrees that a distributed system would have been more acoustically appropriate. “I don’t think VQ or any other end zone stack is preferable over a distributed system, but in most venues we have to balance other factors in finding the best solution. The VQ maintains a consistent tonal quality at high SPL, whether you’re ninety, or nine feet away,” he adds.
In all, the main system is comprised of 14 Tannoy VQ NET 40 MHs placed along the top of the northern video wall/scoreboard. The array consists of two stacks of four boxes in the center, two stacks of two boxes to the left and right of that and, finally, one VQ MH at either end. “The center cluster is aimed at the far, closed end of the horseshoe, with the outer arrays covering the nearer seating areas with fewer boxes as you move to either side, where you don’t need the extra SPL,” Dewees explains.
Low frequency support is provided by four new Renkus-Heinz subwoofers in tandem with six pre-existing Renkus subs. “The Tannoy are dead center of the field, then off to one side the 10 subs are placed in two vertical stacks of five, roughly 60 feet in the air about 20 feet off the one side.”
Control Systems
Various control systems are used; VQNET for the Tannoy mains, RHAON for the Renkus and QSC BASIS for the internal distributed audio systems. “With the QSC DSP we are feeding the mains and we do some general equalization with that, but all the individual speaker’s delays, compression and some tonal adjustments are done using the internal DSP of the various boxes.”
Both Packard and Dewees characterize the audio portion of the project as an augmentation of the existing systems in the venue, explaining that most of the pre-existing mic package was reused, along with the main console, a Soundcraft L7.
Entirely new video elements have been introduced however; two 345-by-3-foot LED ribbon boards running along the fascia of the east and west sides of the stadium, as well as a new 60-by-20-foot LED screen at the south end to match an already-installed screen at the north end.
