Danley reinforces Infinite Energy Arena
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After its original sound reinforcement system fell out of date and beyond repair, the Infinite Energy Arena management chose AV integration firm Logic Systems Sound & Lighting, of St. Louis, Missouri, to install a cost-effective Danley Sound Labs system. The Danley system reuses existing wiring & rigging and far exceeds the design criteria for fidelity and sound pressure level, all while simultaneously slashing the system’s energy budget in half.
“The old system relied on obsolete technology and discontinued products,” explains Chip Self, president of Logic Systems Sound & Lighting. “Components were failing and there was no way to repair them. The arena needed a new sound reinforcement system. Instead of hiring someone to design and spec a system for bid, the management team took a different approach. They specified the performance criteria - such as maximum SPL, maximum SPL variation from seat to seat, frequency response, and intelligibility - and then allowed the integrators to bid on design/installs that would meet those criteria.
“In an arena, a lot of the money goes to rigging and pulling speaker cable - stuff that no one cares about. But those are also the components that don’t go bad . . . in fact, they’ll probably outlast us! Since we could reuse any components from the old system that were still working, we designed a Danley system that could use those very rigging points.”
He continues: “By reusing the existing rigging and cable, we saved a week of work and expense. It also gave us an edge because there were no existing drawings of the old system. Anyone who wasn’t using Danley either had to go with mono-amped boxes that couldn’t meet the SPL requirements, or they had to gamble on the existence of speaker wire to support bi- or tri-amped loudspeakers.
“If they lost that gamble, they’d lose big. In contrast, we had a safe bet: since there was already an existing loudspeaker at each rigging point, it was guaranteed we would have the cable needed for Danley’s passive, internal-crossover boxes. No other loudspeaker manufacturer that I’m aware of makes a passive, internal-crossover box that comes close to Danley’s output.”
Logic Systems Sound & Lighting won the bid with a system that uses 26 Danley SH96 full-range loudspeakers, eight Danley TH118 subwoofers, and nine four-channel Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifiers with integrated on-board processing.
(Jim Evans)
