When the Clay City Eels light up the gymnasium, they’re doing it with the help of a new distributed sound reinforcement system with One Systems loudspeakers; specifically, nine of the company’s On Point Audio branded products.
Tech Electronics Indiana, with headquarters in St. Louis, MO, was brought in to design and install the new system for the multi-purpose gymnasium facility at Clay City, IN, high school, which has a sunken basketball floor with tiered bleacher seating for 2,000 around three sides`of the court. A stage for graduation and other school functions is recessed back from the fourth wall.
“As with most gymnasiums, the room has a lot of hard surfaces, eliminating bounce-back from the walls and ceilings was key to the system design,” explains Jeff Watson, director of Tech Electronics of Indiana. “They wanted clarity but also needed it to be loud enough for announcers to be heard over the noise levels in the gym during basketball games.”
Tech Electronics designed a targeted distributed system with six OPALine vertical line array loudspeakers covering the home and visitor bleachers (three for each side), two more cover the seating at the end of the court, and one more positioned above the stage to cover the gym floor.
“We specified the OPALine loudspeakers because we wanted to be able to steer the sound where we needed it,” adds Watson. “We have used One Systems products in the past but this was our first experience with OPALine. They worked exactly as advertised and provide the clarity and volume the application needs.”
OPALine is a single-box vertical line array loudspeaker that generates very wide horizontal dispersion, while providing precise vertical pattern control. The defined vertical pattern offers excellent intelligibility in reverberant spaces similar to the gymnasium, and maximizes direct to reflected ratios of acoustic radiation.
The new loudspeakers are driven by three Crown Audio CTS 2000 power amplifiers, also provided by Tech Electronics of Indiana.
“The school is very pleased with the end result,” concludes Watson. “It’s the best the gym has sounded in quite some time.”