Problems With Dallas Cowboys' New Stadium Sound System

**Cal Weldon** · September 18th, 2009, 05:48 PM

Mind you, I was trying to find a way to lower this cluster and sneak it into my truck with no one noticing but it ended like a Skip Wiley crusade

**Panomaniac** · September 18th, 2009, 06:05 PM

I would like to see those in your truck, Cal. You would give them a good home - with plenty of company.

Makes me think back to the few months I spent in the Jubilee hockey rink in Leningrad. Lots of big horns and boxes up the rafters. Never could figure out who made them. Soviet stuff i suppose. I tried hard to take them home with me, did not work for me, either. Somewhere I have pics I'll have to dig up.

**Todd W. White** · September 18th, 2009, 07:33 PM

Altec did it really well at Osaka-Jo Hall in Japan...

Also the old Convention Center in Lexington...

**LICORNE** · September 18th, 2009, 07:55 PM

And the Montreal Olympic games in 1976. The stadium had 2 rows of A-7 with the 511 inside. The sound was amazing.Unfortunately the tower with roof was not completed until several years later.The weather din't help much. But the new contractor tried to retain the same character with his custom designed cabinets which by the way require only 100 watts each.The A-7 came down in 1987 .The horns provide constant levels and high intelligibility reducing drastically the echoes in highly resonant stadiums

**Todd W. White** · September 19th, 2009, 10:33 AM

One of the verry interesting things that happened at the Lousiana SuperDome was this -

When they were replacing the original, huge Altec system, which had began to fail due to neglect, they were putting in Bose. We bid on rebuilding the original system, which would have been a real killer system, 'cause we were going to upgrade the original 515B's to 515-8GHP cones, 299 diaphragms in the drivers, changing out some of the multicells to Mantaray's, stuff like that, but Bose gave their system away, so we didn't get the contract.

When they got the Bose system installed, they started taking down the Altec system. The story, as I heard it, was that, when Management heard the Bose system, they ordered the removal of the Altec system halted, and retained it, "just in case we ever need it as a backup."

Of course, it was all destroyed by Katrina, but I found that interesting - High-Q systems, properly designed AND maintained, outperform Low-Q systems in highly reverberant environments...

**analog addict** · September 20th, 2009, 01:44 AM

A little OT, but WTH....

Is there anyone capable of putting together a big Altec system today like these being described? GPA? Anyone else? Or is this just a dream of days long ago?

**LICORNE** · September 20th, 2009, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by analog addict

A little OT, but WTH....

Is there anyone capable of putting together a big Altec system today like these being described? GPA? Anyone else? Or is this just a dream of days long ago?

The problem is not who but financial. You need to borrow money to build such a project
. Then you get paid. One company with financial strenght and know how is Lowrance Sound Company.

Audio Sound System Church Audio System Video Sound System Church Sound Audio Consultant

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**Todd W. White** · September 20th, 2009, 10:46 AM

Murray Keidge does it all the time in Australia...

**bfish** · September 20th, 2009, 12:14 PM

Originally Posted by analog addict

...Is there anyone capable of putting together a big Altec system today like these being described? GPA? Anyone else? Or is this just a dream of days long ago?

Any contractor willing to invest the sweat equity of building their own cabs and refurbishing used horns could buy GPA components and do it. Meeting today's A/E specs that are written around current production systems under a competitive bidding process pretty well kills it though, even if someone wanted to do it.

The second part of your Q could be applied to many such threads here. There's a few here (maybe just 2) that simply refuse to accept it for what it was (a good thing) and move on.

Breaking other peoples bubbles ain't on my to-do list.

**Todd W. White** · September 20th, 2009, 01:32 PM

It would be easy to have a sheet metal shop fabricate Jerry Hubbard's C-version of the Mantaray's that Altec never built and fabricate a throat to attach the large format GPA drivers to them.

The problem, as Brad points out, is the consultants - almost no one is designing (ENGINEERING) systems specifically for facilities any more. The reason, among others, is that it requires too much work. Instead, they design their system around the one-box-does-all packaged speakers available.

Contractors are partly to blame, too - they don't want to spend any more man hours than they absolutely HAVE to in order to get a system installed and, thus, get paid. It's all about time/money. Further, they don't want to pay for someone to be on their staff that knows how to engineer a sound system, like we (Altec contractors) used to...

Customers are to blame for a lot of this, too - they see someone else's new whiz-bang system and think THEY have to have one just like it, and they force the spec writers and contractors to give them what they THINK they HAVE to have, without knowing what they're talking about.

The result is we're almost to the point where there are no consultants or professional sound contractors left that know how to do things properly...