When Dominick Campana, general manager of Pro Sound Alliance, a division of Live Sound, Inc. and a design, sales and installation company was given the task of retrofitting the Suffolk County Community College (SUNY Suffolk) Sports and Exhibition Complex, he turned to Auralex Acoustics, the industry leader in innovative sound control solutions, for all of the buildings’ sound treatment needs. Several Auralex ELiTE ProPanels™ and Custom ELiTE ProBaffles were installed throughout the space.
The 4,000-seat field house’s reflective and parallel surfaces and sloping (quasi-parabolic) steel ceiling structure made the retrofit a necessity: Previous efforts to provide dynamic and articulate sound reinforcement throughout the facility, which is used for a wide array of events and room configurations, were all met with mixed results.
Having worked on a previous project at the school years earlier, Campana and his team were familiar with the buildings’ sound reinforcement problems.
“The sound issues at the facility were threefold,” he says. “One, the sound quality was not sufficient for the multipurpose field houses’ needs. Intelligible speech throughout all of the listening areas was paramount, especially for graduation ceremonies. And basketball games, quite simply, had to rock. Two, the logistics required to set up for any one event were too costly and laborious. And three was the realization that the acoustic environment itself needed to be addressed.”
Campana turned to the experts at Auralex to provide a solution. Auralex engineers modeled the untreated space with 3,000 people and estimated the RT60 of 500Hz at 5.83 seconds. Auralex then designed a treatment scheme to reduce that RT60 to 3.15 seconds.
In order to reduce slap-back reflection between walls and achieve an acceptable reverberation time, 64 Auralex ELiTE ProPanels (4′ x 10′ x 2″ panels) were used across the walls. ProPanels are a fabric-wrapped, Class A, durable absorbent treatment that are easily wall mounted to help absorb discrete reflections and reverberation. In addition to the wall treatment, 260 Auralex Custom ELiTE ProBaffles (4′ x 10′ x 2″ Class A fire-rated panels) were suspended from the ceiling to help further control the room acoustics, especially the reflections between the ceiling and floor.
“Auralex not only provided the acoustic solution we were looking for, they provided a very quick turnaround time that was urgently needed,” adds Campana. “The facility sounds great, looks great and the client was very happy with the results.”