Getting the audio under control at Glendale, Ariz.’s Jobbing.com Arena
So, Neil Rosenbaum hears the phone ringing in his office one day last August and his boss is on the other side. The Jobbing.com Arena production manager picks up to hear the order to completely revamp the audio system. Good news. Bad news? It’s got to be done by Oct. 4 when the arena’s prime occupant, the Phoenix Coyotes of the NHL, opens its season.
Rosenbaum, who had been on the job for about a year before that call, knew that it was coming based on the gear that was in the building. “As soon as I came to the building, it was very apparent that the sound system was budget constructed,” he states. “There were some corners cut with the sound system that was put in the building.” There were issues with intelligibility, energy and consistency, he adds.
However, as far as acoustics, the room sounds amazing. “Every seat is soft, there are bass traps across the entire ceiling, there’s perforated steel on every vertical surface on the building. That’s one of the corners they did not cut when HOK was doing the architecture and building,” he states.
The first step in the process, Rosenbaum reports, was investigating the available options. So, he called around to his peers who worked at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif., and the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa, Fla., to hear what they had installed. Then he started to look at different technologies, including planar magnetic technology, ribbon technology, line arrays and exploded point and shoot clusters.
He also brought in systems from JBL, Meyer and Nexo to demo in the facility, but L-ACOUSTICS’ dV-DOSC system won the day after his trip to Tampa where he put it through the paces by turning up some loud rock music and then screaming into a microphone. “The intelligibility that cut through these speakers was unbelievable,” he says. “It was so crisp and clear, it was like you were listening to two different PAs and one was sig-nificantly louder. There was no EQing, no effects, just microphone straight into the console and straight out. That was what sold me.”
Shortly after the trip, Rosenbaum tapped the AVDB Group out of Phoenix and reached out to L-ACOUSTICS. “We came up with a six-array de-sign with two sub clusters to concentrate the audio from the very first seat behind the glass to the very top standing room seat, which is about 85 feet above the floor,” Rosenbaum reports. “The system puts 115 decibels into every single seat. Right now, we have more L-ACOUSTICS gear up than most rock bands have on tour.” For the record, there are currently 72 dV-DOSC loudspeakers, 16 SB28 and 12 dV-SUBs. L-ACOUSTICS’ new LA-8 DSP processor amplifier powers the system.
One of the other factors that Rosenbaum had to keep in mind before picking the dV-DOSC system was that he had to keep most of the sound off the ice during hockey games. (There are a couple of boxes that hang off the scoreboard over the ice for coverage, but those existed before the audio renovation.) The challenge in accomplishing that is getting the cabinets to aim over eight- to 10-foot-tall pieces of glass in front of the first row of seats. The issue was solved by a multiple array design with six arrays — one on each of the short ends of the arena and then two on the long ends.
Rosenbaum also called for a Yamaha M7CL console at front of house. The M7CL replaced an analog board that was filled with a number of inputs. “It gives us a lot of flexibility,” he says of the new board. “For an arena like us, where we’re doing kind of the same show every day, having the digital options helps us make a cleaner show. The affordability was the number one component of that board. It would have been great to see a PM5D in here, but it’s double the price. For our needs, the M7CL was more than adequate.”
In addition to making sure that he had the right sounding system in place, Rosenbaum concentrated on making sure that the system could disappear when it wasn’t needed. That was especially important, he reports, because more and more acts were coming into town and playing at the arena. In fact, over the past year, the venue has hosted the Foo Fighters, Justin Timberlake, Hannah Montana, as well as Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s joint tour. In addition to hockey and entertainment, Jobbing.com has been the place where locals come to see motocross and rodeo events, and is home to the Arizona Sting of the
National Lacrosse League.
So, a rigging plan was created using the highest steel in the building and now Rosenbaum is actively letting touring acts know that that part of the job is handled. The venue boasts certificates for 120,000 lbs for an end show and 90,000 for a surround show. “When we had an architectural study done with the new equipment that we were rigging off the high steel, the architectural engineers said that we were actually strengthening the build-ing by attaching the roof onto the building better by adding this weight,” he explains. “So, not only were we alleviating about 17,000 lbs of old PA equipment that we’ve taken down, but we’ve strengthened the roof. When we do the next giant in-the-round show, we might be able to accommo-date up to 140,000, which is important because we know these shows aren’t getting any lighter.”
Rosenbaum took the month of August to investigate and work with AVDB to design the system. In September, he engaged with L-ACOUSTICS and then told them the deadline. Rather than balking, the company made available a temporary system that could be hung until the new boxes were built and the amplifiers made available.
Then, on Sept. 26, a 135-foot boom lift was brought into the venue to do about 60 points of rigging. “Without that lift, it would have tripled our time to have guys climb up there, get each of these points and run the 12 miles or so of cable,” Rosenbaum reports. “Cable management was an-other issue that we had to deal with and we ended up going with a chain runner system because these clusters are able to go all the way down to the floor and all the way up into the air using one-ton chain motors.”
Three days later, at six in the morning, the job was complete. “We basically worked 24 hours a day,” Rosenbaum recalls. “We had a crew of local riggers and hands and the AVDB guys were out here pulling cable with all of us. It was an all effort go to meet that opening day deadline and working around arena events at the same time.”
Reports from around the arena have been overwhelming, he says. Fans have sent e-mails telling them to turn it up louder (the NHL has a strict 95 dB limit), players have mentioned how much they enjoy hearing music during warm-ups and the cheerleaders (Hockey cheerleaders? Wow.) can now hear and feel the beat. Also, fans are now able to understand what’s being spoken during the produced talking head pieces aired in between breaks in the action. Now that the whirlwind has died down and he’s checked everything out, Rosenbaum has been able to sit back and enjoy the system. “I went around with a decibel meter for several games and sat in every single seat,” he says. “I could not find an inconsistent seat.” His re-lief is clear, and it seems he’s not so afraid when the caller ID displays his boss’ number.
