Owned by the City of Anaheim and managed since 2003 by Anaheim Arena Management, LLC, the Arrowhead Pond opened in 1993. In addition to being home to the NHL's Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, the Pond hosts major sporting events and yearly shows such as the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Disney on Ice, and books major concerts each year. Some of those events pushed the limits of the arena's previous console–a 16-input analog board with eight subs, eight matrix outs and four aux outs. "I had to get pretty creative during the Stanley Cup Finals," says the arena's sound technician, Nathan Chivers, about working with the previous console. "I didn't have any room left." Still, despite these limitations, the Pond was nominated as Arena of the Year by the Pollstar Concert Industry Awards at the end of 2004, the seventh time since 1994 the venue has been so honored.
Is the Arrowhead Pond content to rest on their laurels? Not at all. In May of this year, they underwent a major overhaul of the sound system centered on a Yamaha PM5D digital audio console integrated with Yamaha's DME 64 N (Digital Mixing Engine) for Front of House DSP and audio distribution throughout the facility. This is just part of a series of technology upgrades that the Arrowhead Pond has been implementing over the past year under the guidance of director of operations Kevin Starkey.
"In the arena's center scoreboard, we installed four Mitsubishi 9- x 16-foot Diamond Vision LEDerboard® video screens," says Starkey, "and an 850-foot Daktronics 23mm LED ribbon board on the lower bowl fascia. Our video room is totally digital now and HD-capable. The addition of the PM5D is the first step we've taken in upgrading our audio system."
The PM5D, Chivers' first choice of console once the decision to go digital was made, has changed many aspects of the sound setup at the Pond. "This board is phenomenal," he says. "There's nothing that can compare to it right now for our type of application. The layout is totally intuitive, much like an analog console. One fader doesn't do 15 things. You don't have to flip between scenes to see what you've got working."
The digital decision was based, in part, around Chivers thinking about everything downstream from the console and the DME 64 N–distribution, routing for amplifiers, control and signal processing. "We want to be digital right up to the amplifier inputs," he says, "but we may want to switch back to analog at that point," rather than adding a layer of onboard processing and programming at the amplifier stage and creating needless redundancy.
Currently, Crown CTS and Macro-Tech ampli- fiers power the arena's FOH loudspeaker systems, a patchwork made up of EAW MH 662 and 660 speaker cabinets, JBL subs and EAW KF852 cabinets "just to fill in a little around the top," Chivers says. Speaker processing is handled by EAW MX300i units. Chivers is looking at JBL's PD700 line as a possible replacement and at controlling everything via Harman's emerging HiQNet platform.
Getting rid of the hodgepodge is part of what is driving the upgrade. The other is that the Pond is actively seeking to host an NBA franchise. The PM5D might seem like overkill for hockey play-by-play, but professional sports–especially the NBA–ceased to be about just the game some time ago, and the league demands that any arena hosting a team be capable of putting on a multimedia extravaganza. But because the PM5D has the equivalent of several racks full of dynamics and effects-processing gear onboard–56 gates, 92 comps, 97 delays, 12 GEQs, including eight units of SPX2000 class multieffects–Chivers has waved goodbye to his outboard gear. "Every piece of non-digital outboard gear raises the noise floor. We can avoid this completely with the 5D's onboard processing," he says.
The arena is also multipurpose and has a theatre configuration that brings the capacity down to about 8,000 for more sedate productions. Chivers says that the old system made getting sound to where it needed to be a real challenge. This is something he hopes to tackle with the PD700s in a center cluster with delay rings around the canopy.
In addition to swapping out the current crop of Crown amps (for iTechs, a process already underway), Chivers is also contemplating moving the amp room, which is now some 300 feet from main speakers. "That's a lot of copper," says Chivers, enough to cause a six dB loss over the run. "I want those dBs back!" he says, and hopes to do so by either moving the amps onto the rigging platform or to the catwalk directly above the speakers.
Chivers is using the cascade cable to link the PM5D and DME 64 for two-way communication, thereby making all the DME I/O card slots available. "The PM5D will handle everything going into the bowl," says Chivers, "while the DME will handle distribution for all backstage outputs. That's everything not going back into the bowl, from radio and TV feeds, to function rooms and restrooms." Currently, the PM5D handles 32 floor inputs from the bowl, and the DME handles 30 distribution outputs throughout the facility. (The DME's capacity is 64 I/Os.)
The DSP power of the DME can do almost anything, says Chivers, but "to keep things simplified" he plans to use the DME as an output matrix and distribution hub with system control handled by another network.
Meanwhile, initial tests of the PM5D with the house system revealed immediate sonic improvements: "The clarity in the high end especially was obvious, and the low end was more focused and tight," says Chivers. He is running in 24-bit/96KHz mode. The 650,000-square-foot arena has three levels and seats 17,174 for the Mighty Ducks, its primary tenant.
Though still in the "being installed" stage, the system nevertheless has a summer series of large events to take on including Tony Hawk's Boom Boom Huckjam, World Wrestling Entertainment's Supershow, Stevie Nicks, the circus and the World Badminton Championship.
While no one likes to mix in an arena designed primarily as a sporting venue, the team at the Pond has made big efforts to make the room sound good for shows of all stripes. "Visiting engineers are often surprised. They take one look at the ceiling and think there is no way to make it sound good. But most of them end up pleasantly surprised," Chivers says.
