Install

Supported By

Danley Loudspeakers Help Bring Intelligibility To Reverberant Fieldhouse At Lock Haven University

Thomas Fieldhouse at Lock Haven University (Lock Haven, PA), built in 1935, has been outfitted with a new sound system headed by Danley Sound Labs OS80 point-source loudspeakers that have helped tame the acoustics of what has historically been a very “boomy” room.

Bo Miller, director of information technology for LHU and the “voice of the Bald Eagles” athletic teams, notes, “Admittedly, the poor intelligibility of my announcements was a big part of my desire to replace the nearly 25 year-old equipment that was present in the Thomas Fieldhouse gym.”

“Danley’s patented point-source designs offer far superior intelligibility to all the other options that are on the market,” adds Tyler Hoffman, senior creative at Illuminated Integration, the firm that installed the system for LHU. “The old system used numerous front-loaded drivers, coaxial and horn products. It produced a mash of phasing problems. The old system could go loud, but it wasn’t clear. Intelligibility was their big problem. Danley was the right choice.”

Skip Welch, eastern regional sales manager at Danley Sound Labs and a veteran integrator, designed the system in collaboration with Miller. The gym has seating on one side of the court and at both end zones. Three Danley OS80 loudspeakers cover the sideline bleachers and two OS80s cover each of the two end zones.

In addition, an eighth OS80 fires straight down to cover the court itself. Seven more OS80s cover a warmup gym, and all of the loudspeakers are placed on zones so they can be turned on or off to accommodate different types of events – including graduation ceremonies and different size crowds.

Three Danley TH118 subwoofers, one over each section of seating, complete the deployment. Two four-channel Danley DNA 10k4 Pro amplifiers with integrated 96 kHz DSP power the system and provide custom presets for the OS80 loudspeakers and TH118 subwoofers.

Once it was installed, acoustician and Danley engineer Doug Jones traveled to the site to tune the system for maximum intelligibility. Despite the gym’s tremendous reverb time and overall boominess, the Danley OS80s’ focused, phase-coherent audio measured at 0.7 STI with single zones turned on and 0.55 with the entire system engaged. Both measurements are a worst-case scenario because there were no bodies to absorb the down-firing sound.

“We were worried that it might just turn into a huge echo chamber given how acoustically challenging the space is,” Miller notes. “After all, we’re in a gym that’s really old. But initial testing has shown the design to be sound, and it works quite well.

“I was also concerned that only having three Danley TH118 subwoofers in the venue wouldn’t give the low-end impact I was hoping for, but I have to say, the product and design very much exceeded my expectations,” he adds. “I knew that when I initially chose to go with a Danley system, I was choosing the industry leader in point-source speaker systems, and now I’m positive that I made the right choice. We’ve worked with Illuminated Technology in the past and they were a great installation partner on this job as well.”

Danley Sound Labs
Illuminated Integration

Install Top Stories

Supported By

Linea Research is a leading designer and manufacturer of high performance power amplifiers and DSP controllers for the entertainment, live sound, installed sound and commercial sound markets.