Todd W. White, Owner & Webmaster
Altec Lansing's (unofficial) Homepage
While it seems that the new stadium may present new challenges, the article sounds like it's mostly excuses. I also wonder if acoustics were given any thought during the design process of the stadium....... I suppose the building could be that horrible acoustically.
Audio_by_Goodwill
Michigan, USA
My guess is they DIDN'T take into consideration the room acoustics.
Years and years ago, old C. P. "Doc" Boner was presenting to a large church his design for room acoustics and a sound system for their proposed new sanctuary. They asked how much all this would cost, and Doc told them When told that what he was proposing would cost too much, Doc asked them how many seats they were planning to have in the new facility. They immediately told him, with some pride, to boot.
"And are these pews going to be upholstered?", Doc asked.
"Yes." came the reply.
"Seats AND backs, or just seats?", asked Doc.
"Oh - seats AND backs, of course!", the Committee stated.
"And how much will those pews cost?", the good doctor asked.
They rattled off a figure, Doc divided it by the number of people the building was said to be able to house, and said -
"Well, gentlemen, I'll take my leave of you now - because your REAR-TO-EAR RATIO is way off!"
Well, they got the point, and allowed Doc's designs to be implemented, and, of course, they ended up with a compfortable room with great acoustics and a properly operating sound system.
A fellow who is an acquaintance of mine says the system is a huge compilation of line arrays - that alone should tell us something of WHY they're having problems, to begin with: no real directivity.
My friend, the late Dr. John K. Hilliard, designed a line array for Altec in the late 1960's. They worked fairly well, considering that line arrays don't work very well.
One of the finest thinkers in this area is Barry McKinnon. He has an EXCELLENT series of articles on all kinds of audio-related topics, including cluster design and line arrays.
One of my favorite ones he's written on the topic of line arrays can be found here:
Loudspeaker Cluster Case Study
Todd W. White, Owner & Webmaster
Altec Lansing's (unofficial) Homepage
I found the type of speaker used . They are EV line arrays large and medium. Now that stadium is not an Olympic stadium. In Montreal we use a custom made huge horn loaded cab
with JBL for the seats. The bands bring their own gear and we use both systems. We haven't had any complaint so far.ACDC was the last performer and the critic was great.
Cowboys Stadium EV
World’s largest Electro-Voice system for new Dallas Cowboys Stadium - Electrovoice
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Montreal Olympic stadium
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But better yet. Use Altec 817 Cabs with large Mantaray Horn. These were designed with the highest speech intelligibility in the most reverberant situations.
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What would REALLY work well would be 210 or 211 cabinets, or, better yet, straight bass horns, with 515-8GHP's in them, plus large-format MANTARAY's (Jerry Hubbard's "C"-version - not the earlier ones), perhaps even custom built for the purpose, using 290's or, perhaps, 299's manifolded with 4 drivers per horn, similar to the original system in the Lousiana SuperDome.
If you even heard THAT system when it was working properly (before they let it run down), it was IMPRESSIVE!
They really should have used Hi-Q devices.
Don and Carolyn Davis and I were talking about the various problems caused and encountered by high-level multiple speaker locations in large venues such as this one day, and they both commented on how people who design these low-Q systems seem to have forgotten the need for articulation and directivity in system design, and seem to have no comprehension as to the long signal paths (echo's) caused by all of these multiple speaker locations played at high levels. The key, they said, was to use High-Q devices that didn't HAVE to play loud in order to deliver proper SPL levels and clear articulation to the audiences, thus reducing the amount of interference caused by multiple sound paths arriving at the listener's ears and interfering with intelligibility.
Don then lamented, "The first thing these people do to try to demonstrate how wonderful the new sound system is is to play music through it!" Utterly annoyed, he continued. "To REALLY know what a system can do, you have to TALK through it!", which reminded me of what my friend the late Dr. John K. Hilliard used to say:
"Anyone can take a loudspeaker, place it in a room, hook it up to an amplifier, and play music through it, and, you know, it won't sound too bad. BUT - when you place a microphone in that same room, connect it to that same amplifier, turn it on, and they are operating in the same space in real time, you open up a Pandora's Box of acoustical phenomena we're only beginning to understand.", followed closely by his very famous phrase with regard to all of this, "We're only beginning to nibble around the edges of the moderately difficult."
When the first BIG sound system of this type went in, it was installed in the Houston Astrodome. A HUGE Altec system, Don, who worked for Altec at the time, was called in by Doc Boner to assist him in equalizing the system. Seems like he spent several weeks there, as I recall...
When he finally got back to Anaheim, he walked into the Altec Engineering Dept., and started telling, as I recall, Jim Noble, Art Davis, and some others the system design and what had happened with Doc Boner.
"Sounds like the system would go into feedback before you even turned it on," someone quipped.
As Jim Noble and Art Davis, and probably Bob Bird, were sitting there talking to Don, they began to talk about Boner's equalization methods, which were primitive, at best. One of them, probably Jim Noble, took out a piece of paper, drew what many of us remember as the variable-Q notch filter, and Acousta-Voicing was born. And the rest is history...
Todd W. White, Owner & Webmaster
Altec Lansing's (unofficial) Homepage
I wouldnt be so sure. From the linked news article:Originally Posted by Todd W. White
Jack Wrightson, a partner in the acoustic consulting firm used by the Cowboys, said that designing any facility is a balancing act between competing needs.
What's good for the gridiron isn't necessarily good for the concert stage.
"Any construction project you might have, even remodeling the bathroom in your house, there's always a trade-off between aesthetics, cost, schedule, performance and what you want it to do," Wrightson said.
The giant glass doors in the end zones are spectacular architectural features that often flood the field with natural light, but they also make acousticians cringe.
Sound ? whether coming from Joe Sixpack or Joe Jonas ? ricochets off the glass and contributes to a noisy atmosphere. That can be a plus when the opposing offensive linemen can't hear the quarterback, but annoying for a fan listening to the lyrics of a favorite song.
"You have to primarily consider it a sports facility and not a concert facility," he said.
When he worked on the acoustics and sound system for Stanford University's basketball arena, Lewitz said athletic department officials were worried that the facility could be too acoustically dead. They wanted a facility that would be loud and give them a home court advantage.
Sounds like a noisy arena is what the Cowboys wanted, and got.
Yes, but I've worked with enough architects to know that you can NEVER get most of them to understand (or at least, admit) that the room acoustics MUST be considered at the same level as the aesthetics, if not more. He did the best with what they LET him do - I am sure of that...
Todd W. White, Owner & Webmaster
Altec Lansing's (unofficial) Homepage
Todd, that is not a line array in the article you referenced.
Actually, you're right - I went back and re-read it, and I mistakenly said it was. Sorry about that.
However - Barry's points on system design are still excellent, and much of what he says in that article is appropriate for this discussion.
Thanks for the clarification.
Todd W. White, Owner & Webmaster
Altec Lansing's (unofficial) Homepage
You are welcome.
However, the point should be, what are you measuring?
I know a little bit about that system. The problem the owner had was not that there was interference between adjacent loudspeakers, but rather that there was interference between the owner's wallet and the owner's expectations.
Barry might have written a self serving article about the cluster, but correcting all the interference in the system was not, and never would be the solution. Simply measuring and pointing out that mutiple boxes exhibit lobes is hardly a solution, when you are 20 dB down from where the owner had hoped to be. And 20dB away in budget.
Did you notice there was no solution referenced in the article?
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