A custom portal leading to the 19,000-seat Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in downtown Cleveland, home of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and hosting more than 200 ticketed events annually, is outfitted with a d&b audiotechnik Soundscape immersive sound system implemented by Metinteractive (Oxford, CT) to accompany unique digital video content.
Cavaliers SVP and chief information officer Michael Conley spurred the creation of the portal, working with the team’s designers to provide fans with a spectacular entrance to the arena. The result is a seamless dvLED tunnel experience designed and implemented by ANC LiveSync that’s coupled with the Soundscape system.
“Metinteractive came up with a layout for the portal very quickly,” states project leader Richard Gold. “d&b Soundscape using the DS100 processor with En-Scene software was one of our earliest decisions and gave us the ability to move the sound around the space to be aligned with the video content. The system and speakers are hidden under LED sidewalls primarily. When the project team realized more speakers were required, we added speakers at ceiling height at either end of the portal.”
“We set out to create a tunnel that looked spectacular and very clean with the objective to create buzz so that fans would seek out that tunnel every time they entered the building for a game or event, ” Conley explains. The focus then turned to content with theatrical sound design performed by Broken Chord, conversations with the creative teams building the video, and field trips to d&b in Asheville, NC for system demonstrations. The Cavs also built their own content design studio on premises so they can continually update material for each home game.
Gold notes that his team didn’t have to make any adjustments to the sound for consistency between the content studio and the power portal, and that Soundscape exceeded their expectations. “What surprised me in a good way was that we originally planned on the visual to help guide the position of the audio in order to obtain a vertical access, but we found we could also make the sound appear to be coming from the ceiling.”
The goal of the design of the portal space to include audio and video as an interactive experience for attendees is based on what is scheduled for a particular day, i.e., if it’s a Cavaliers game, it’s Cavaliers-related video, or an Elton John concert, it’s tailored to that event.
“The power portal has become a popular fan destination and will be for many years to come,” Conley concludes. The organization is also experimenting with piping real-time data into the visual experience to further personalizing a fan’s experience as they navigate from the atrium to the concourse and back.
