The new multipurpose venue was designed to accommodate a wide range of events
USA - On 15 September, Georgia State University officials cut the ribbon on the school’s new Convocation Centre in the Summerhill neighbourhood of Atlanta. The new multipurpose 200,000sq.ft facility on the site of the former Atlanta Braves baseball stadium seats up to 8,000 and was designed to accommodate a wide range of events, including conferences, commencements, graduation ceremonies, concerts, and sports - most notably basketball as the new home of the Georgia State Panthers men’s and women’s NCAA Division I teams.
A venue this flexible needed a sound system equal to the task. It found one in the A15i loudspeaker from L-Acoustics, 42 of which use both Wide and Focus enclosures to guarantee precise coverage at every seat - comprising a sound system configurable for any occasion. System design and specification were performed by Idibri, a Salas O’Brien Company, while the system installation and integration was accomplished by Athens, GA-based Technical Services Audio Visual (TSAV).
“It’s essentially one sound system that can operate as two separate sound systems,” explains Ben Boeshans, senior consultant at Idibri. “There are clusters over the stage, court, and seating areas, and each are programmed to either fire or mute, depending upon the application. We designed in a QSC Q-SYS Core 510i as the control system, and the configurations and switching are programmed using the L-Acoustics Q-SYS plug-in, which offers streamlined native control of the amplified controllers and loudspeakers. The entire system can be reset as needed at the push of a button.”
The 42 A Series loudspeakers are deployed in hangs designed for either “event” or “sports” modes. The former comprises two main forward-firing arrays of four enclosures each over the stage, buttressed by two three-enclosure side-fill arrays. Coverage to the seats furthest from the stage is accomplished with five delayed arrays.
In the “sports” mode, those delay speakers become five of the eight main arrays covering the seats for basketball. These are either two- , three-, or four-box arrays, depending upon the configurations of the seating areas they need to cover.
In addition, there are four KS28 subwoofers hung over the centre court as two hangs in a dipole configuration. The subwoofer design, says Boeshans, directs the sound to create an ellipse that more uniformly covers the seating areas. In total, a dozen amplified controllers power this remarkably flexible system: 11 LA4X and one LA12X.

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