Performance Audio’s Craig Hylton admits with a laugh that he has spent more time watching the Utah Jazz in person this season than he has in recent memory. It helps that Hylton is both a basketball fan and that he can call his appearances at EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City a work gig. “The team had a rough start,” he says, “but it’s fun to go to the games. I’m still learning what their needs are and how to tune the system.” The arena, which opened in 1991 as the United Center, was named EnergySolutions Arena after the company purchased the naming rights in 2006. Considered the largest arena within five states, a variety of concerts, ice shows, circuses and Olympic events, as well as Arena Football, WNBA, IHL and NBA games take place there. Depending on the configuration, the arena can seat up to 22,000 patrons.
Bouncing Ideas Back and Forth
The design of the original PA, Hylton says, was a good one. “But as they got along through construction, corners had to be cut and that was one of the things that had to be lost,” he says. Over the years, the system deteriorated leaving the upper bowl of the arena barely covered, and the lower bowl suffered from compromised intelligibility.
Over the years, Hylton reports, his Salt Lake City-based company has been in on a half-dozen proposals to replace the system. Dave Hansen, who works with Electro-Voice, approached the company in 2008 to put together a new proposal for the arena’s facility management company. “The engineers at EV put together some designs and we bounced some things back and forth,” Hylton recalls. “Then they put the installation out to bid to two local suppliers. I guess I was a little more eager than the competition. You don’t often get to see an install that big in this neck of the woods.”
The staff at the EnergySolutions Arena got to work first, pulling out the existing system and moving the chain motors to fly the new PA, while the Performance Audio squad began fine tuning the design with Hansen’s team. The initial design called for a six-array hang, but after taking a look at the boxes being called for and the space, Hylton asked if they could do it with four. Upon further review, the design was updated to include a four-array hang that included Electro-Voice XLC 127DVX loudspeakers.
The array—12 boxes pointed toward each basket and 14 boxes aimed toward the sides—is hung above the scoreboard, so it had to be cranked hard at the bottom in order to cover the upper and lower bowls. “We got maximum curvature out of the side arrays without going to a second motor to pull up the tail of them,” Hylton explains. “So, it barely covers the bottom bowl, but it does a nice job and keeps the sound off the floor, which the NBA is kind of picky about.”
Keeping the NBA Happy
Keeping the Association happy, it turns out, was not much of an issue. In fact, Hylton reports, the NBA’s requirements “never got expressed to me terribly clearly,” he says. “I guess the NBA is like a lot of different noise ordinance enforcers, they’re not out looking for a problem, but they respond to complaints, and those complaints would largely come from players and coaches.”
In addition to the 127DVXs that are curved down to cover the lower bowl, there are four FRX+640s hung from the scoreboard to cover the court. “They are tuned such that they kind of disappear,” Hylton says. “It just adds a little bit of clarity on the floor, rather than being real obvious.” Those boxes are especially important for pre-game and halftime entertainment acts.
Where many audio installs of this nature would call for power and oomph, Hylton reports that the arena’s owners were predominantly concerned with the intelligibility of the team’s announcer. “We went back to them again and again and said, ‘This is not going to rock your socks off. We’re not putting subs in this.’ They said they didn’t care about that,” he says. “So, we ran with that, which gave us a lot of slack. It turned out that we don’t use all the low-end capability that’s in the system, because in tuning the room we took down the low frequency, even though it’s a single 12. That room is one that holds on to lows like crazy, and if you excite it down there, you lose it.”
Pumping Up the Arena
One thing that worked in the install team’s favor was the fact that the arena handled the highs and mids pumped from the new boxes well, especially since there was no acoustic treatments that were included with the work. “When we were tuning the room the very high frequencies, say 5K and up, there’s a surprising amount of width of coverage,” he says. “I would be way off axis, listening to one array, and I was able to hear a lot of it. The boxes worked really well for us.”
In addition to the EV boxes, Hylton supplied and installed a Midas console for the venue. At first, he says, a Venice was purchased, but then things had to change. “It turned out that the Venice didn’t have enough aux sends,” he reports. “That didn’t get looked at hard enough, so they had to upgrade to a Siena. They need a ton of aux sends, because they have two or three different radio feeds, two or three different television feeds and feeds to different places in the building. It’s very helpful if they can tweak each of those feeds, so it’s an aux send rather than a matrix.”
The system is powered by 28 P3000RL amps and one P1200 for the high end of the down fill boxes and controlled by two NetMax N8000 digital matrix controllers that run IRIS-Net software. The signal from the front of house up to the amplifier rack is carried via Cobra Net. The IRIS-Net software is helpful, Hylton explains, to monitor the activity of the amps. “We can do system checks and look for changes on the loads of the amplifier channels, so we can easily pick up on any failures on the speakers.”
The system has been used at the Jazz’s home basketball games successfully, Hylton says, and he looks forward to a time when touring bands will use it. “I think we may find down the road that there will be shows that will ask to use some of this system as a delay fill for the back of the hall,” he reports. “There are other kinds of traveling events that they have in there – like any arena they do everything in the world from sporting events to conventions to ice shows and circuses—and I think we may find that it will be more useable for those events.”
