Article

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Texas-Sized Sound For “America’s Team” At New Dallas Cowboys Stadium

Copious quantities of line arrays, cabling, system control, amplification and more for the NFL’s largest enclosed stadium

Between Dallas and Forth Worth, next to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Texas. the new Cowboys Stadium is three times larger than the NFL team’s previous home at Texas Stadium in nearby Irving.

At $1.2 billion, it’s the league’s most expensive stadium to date, although that price tag is due to be eclipsed by the Jets-Giants new $1.6 billion stadium next year.

The entire Statue of Liberty and its base would fit inside the stadium with the roof closed, as would the American Airlines Center arena in Dallas. At 104 million cubic feet – Houston’s Reliant Stadium in is 90 MCF – the Cowboys new home is the NFL’s largest enclosed stadium.

The roof is supported by two 35- by15-foot arched box trusses that are 1,300 feet long – more than twice the length of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis – making it the longest clear-span structure in the world. Back-to-back 72- by 160-foot high-definition video screens – the largest in the world – stretch between the 20-yard lines.

Seating capacity is 80,000, but with additional ticketed seating and standing room in the end zone plazas, total capacity can swell to 100,000.

Cowboys Stadium is also now the world’s largest Electro-Voice installation, including virtually every type EV line array backed by an intensive NetMax control system.

Sound system designer was Kevin Day of consultant firm Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams (WJHW) of Dallas, which counts major league stadiums as one of its specialties, and installation and custom engineering services were supplied by San Francisco Bay-area vendor ProMedia/UltraSound, with Demetrius Palavos serving as project manager. The EV team also provided technical support on the project.

“I decided early-on that the stadium required a line array solution,” Day remarks. “I had used EV line arrays in other projects and heard them in several touring productions. I was quite pleased with the sound and impressed with the accuracy of the performance data. Not all line array products out there have accurate data for predicting system performance. The fact that these systems could also be integrated with a system control platform as powerful as IRIS-Net and NetMax made EV the strongest choice.”

The stadium’s audio control room on the upper suite level employs a Yamaha M7CL-48, chosen for its straightforward single layer design, fitted with a pair of AES MY cards for digital inputs from playback devices next door in Video Control.

Local audio inputs include a Tascam CD player, recorder and tuner, Sony multi-disc CD and DVD changers, a Mackenzie Labs message repeater, and a Click Effects ProAudio PC playback system for “Rock and Roll, Part 2” and other crowd-rousers. The announcer’s mike so far has been a Shure SM58 on a Symetrix AirTools vocal processor.

Another pair of MY cards feed the M7CL to back-of-house locations and accepts remote inputs via CobraNet, including an SKB rolling rack with a Whirlwind ES2 16 x 16 digital snake chassis for inputs and outputs on the field. Four Shure PSM 600 IEM systems are available for entertainment and the “anthem” wireless mics are Shure UHF-R with Beta 87A capsules.

The M7CL’s main output feeds a 1RU Oxmoor RMX-44 mixing matrix to accept changeover from fire alarm alarms, then goes to an Aphex Dominator to provide absolute peak limiting, before being delivered to the BSS London BLU-800 that’s the mix position’s gateway to the system’s CobraNet fiber backbone.

“I use CobraNet for its ease of interoperability between various manufacturers’ equipment,” Day notes, adding, “In a venue of this size, digital latency isn’t a big factor, as it would be in other types of audio systems.”

At each of the four corners of the stadium, between the uppermost seating and the catwalks, are the “engine rooms” that power the overhead line arrays. BSS London BLU-320 interfaces deliver signals to an EV N8000 NetMax digital matrix controller, whose FIR filter technology combines crossover and EQ correction in a single filter to provide linear phase optimization for EV loudspeakers.

The main loudspeaker arrays are powered by 228 of EV’s new class H Tour Grade amplifiers, with RCM-26 DSP modules. TG5’s power all high frequency drivers and TG7s power the rest.

In addition to providing AES inputs as the final link in a digital signal chain, RCM-26 modules in the TG amps provide remote control and monitoring, including one-button system check over IRIS-Net, as well as additional FIR-filters and speaker protection.

“We needed to be able to critically supervise each piece of equipment to prevent expensive repairs or driver replacements from being necessary,” Day adds. “Load monitoring is a critical feature when your speakers are 200 feet off the ground at the end of a quarter-mile of cable.

Between the TG amps, IRIS-Net, and NetMax, the range of control and monitoring features this system has gives us the assurance that won’t be an issue.”

Those familiar with Los Angeles’ Staples center and its triple row of glass-fronted luxury suites recognize one problem faced at Cowboys Stadium on a larger scale. A 30- foot high glass wall for the suites separates the lower bowl of the stadium from the upper-most seating area – the 400 sections.

The main loudspeaker system is comprised of three sub-systems, each constructed from a different EV line array product. Immediately apparent are three large-format 15-box X-Line XLV arrays on each side of the field that cover the lower bowl with an angle that approaches horizontal. Additionally, two 7-box XLV arrays cover the lower bowl’s end zones.

Due to the compression placed on the enclosures at such a radical angle, plus the fact that it’s a permanent installation, ProMedia designed custom “sleds” to hold these arrays.

These were rigged by John Bleich’s ProRig of Dallas using SkyClimber wire-rope winches, typically used for skyscraper window washing.

The 400-level seats in the upper bowl are covered with seven mid-sized 8-box XLC arrays on each side of the field. Additional coverage of the field’s perimeter to the first couple rows of seats comes from six compact 5-box XLE arrays, three on each end of the overhead video screen.

In total, the line array spec includes 104 X-Line (Xvls & Xvlt) large-format line array elements, 108 XLCi127DVX medium-format line array elements, and 30 XLE181 compact line array elements.

The stadium’s sheer size required cable runs of 1,000 to 1,600 feet for the overhead clusters, using 12-gauge multi-conductor Belden wire for mids and highs, and 10-gauge for the lows. Since the stadium’s roof opens to expose the arrays to the elements, the X-Line cabinets were special-ordered with blue polyester Meltric PN12 multi-pin connectors rated for weather exposure.

Two days before the first Cowboys pre-season game, Paul McCartney performed for a sold-out crowd, and I ran across this anecdote: “During the “Na na na na” portion of main set-closer ‘Hey Jude’, McCartney asked various sections to sing the parts for him. They did, although when he called out on the top section to sing it for him, it seemed that they were refusing. McCartney, on stage, looked confused. Then, maybe two seconds later, the sound of their voices finally reached him on stage. That’s how big this stadium is, folks.” – Pete Freedman, Dallas Observer

Mark Frink is Associate Editor for Live Sound International.

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