COLLEGE STATION, TX — Behind a black mesh screen atop the 11-story video scoreboard at Texas A&M's Kyle Field in College Station sit two tiers of eight parabolic dishes each, which are actually a complement of Meyer Sound SB-1 parabolic long-throw sound beams. When fired up on game day, the 54 loudspeakers in the system carry announcements and the music-punctuated soundtracks for the videos shown on "12th Man TV" (as the Mitsubishi video screen is known). Kyle Field is not an easy place in which to deliver sound. Its permanent seating capacity is 82,600. (It also claims to be, when packed with ardent Aggie fans, the loudest anywhere.) Compounding the task is the size and scale of "The Zone," a new expansion section. Sprawling opposite the scoreboard, it places nearly a quarter of the stadium's seats at distances between 500 and 725 feet away from the point-source audio system. In addition, the system has to cover all but the deepest under-balcony seats of the three-tier seating sections along both sidelines, with all seats receiving robust levels to appropriately complement the 4,000-square-foot screen.
Scaling audio to match the video was an integrated task from the start, as design of both systems was assigned to the Dallas consulting firm of Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon and Williams (WJHW). WJHW managing principal Chris Williams and senior associate Gary White took care of the far-flung seats of "The Zone."
"Since it's regarded as a high-end touring concert system, the MILO is not normally what you'd look for in a collegiate sports facility," acknowledges Williams. "But it wasn't the 'concert quality' we were looking at so much as the controlled directivity. The MILOs allowed us to cover the extensive sidelines areas and a good part of the end zone with a uniformity that would have been difficult to achieve with conventional solutions."
The Kyle Field system is composed of twin left and right arrays of 10 MILO cabinets each, augmented by a center array of eight MILO 60 high-power narrow coverage curvilinear array loudspeakers. Sidefill is provided by four SB-2 parabolic wide-range sound beams, with downfill for seats directly in front handled by four UPJ-1P compact VariO loudspeakers. A Galileo loudspeaker management system takes care of all system drive processing.
Pro Media/UltraSound (PMUS), of Hercules, Calif., supplied and installed all the Meyer Sound systems. PMUS's Demetrius Palavos managed the project, with David Bowers contributing to the rigging and final tuning.
Meyer Sound's Design Services department worked closely with WJHW to ensure that the system design would meet their performance specifications and requirements. "The installation went very smoothly, and it all matched up and worked well," says Palavos.
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