Bankers Life Fieldhouse was named Conseco Fieldhouse when it opened its doors in 1999. Conseco Fieldhouse replaced Market Square Arena, the previous home of the NBA’s Indiana Pacers. The Bankers Life name was instituted in 2011 and to this day the arena remains the Pacers basketball home. It’s also home to the Indiana Fever of the WNBA and plays host to the Big Ten college basketball tournament, ice hockey and numerous live concerts with big time national acts.
To capitalize on the buzz, the Indiana Pacers organization started looking for ways to pump up the energy on the court during games. They turned to Randy Skaggs at Village Audio, who looked immediately to the Clair Brothers kiT Series for a solution.
The criterion was threefold: Complete courtside coverage on all sides, down-firing court coverage, and all loudspeakers must be self-powered. No simple task considering the high intelligibility to cover the public seating areas and courtside along with zone isolation from the court. The kiTCurve, with its 90° H x 15° V coverage pattern, performed solidly for the short throw to the long sides of the court, but Skaggs recognized that something more directional was needed to project to the far court corners; and for that he sought TrueFit – another Clair Brothers concept.
Clair Brothers and Village Audio collaborated to study the loudspeaker positions and coverage angle requirements. They determined that indeed a custom dispersion on the scoreboard corners could offer better coverage with minimum overlap to other sources. A separate zone was created to cover the court itself and consists of the point source twelve-inch member of the Clair Brothers kiT Series – the kiT12.
Skaggs sums it up. “I’ve had a great track record with Clair Brothers and learned about the TrueFit concept when they demoed the kiTCurve version at InfoComm last year. For the Bankers Life project, the minute details mattered and were vital to finding the right solution. The fact that Clair Brothers can deliver customized solutions (and relatively quickly too) is an undeniable asset. The team at Bankers Life Fieldhouse is thrilled with the result, as are we.”
