At 100,000-plus seats, Bryant-Denny Stadium at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa ranks as one of the largest college football venues in the country, and it’s now outfitted with a new sound reinforcement system designed and installed by Baker Audio Visual (Norcross, GA) that’s headed by Danley Sound Labs loudspeakers and subwoofers.
Pleased with the authoritative performance of its on-field sound reinforcement system – a single Danley GH-60 Genesis Horn paired with a single Danley TH-212 subwoofer – the university sought that same performance level throughout the stadium.
Constrained by an aggressive timeline that necessitated reusing existing hang points, Baker AV installed Danley’s new weatherproof OS-80 loudspeakers and OS-115 subwoofers in the upper bowl, with Danley SH-96HO loudspeakers (and additional OS-80 loudspeakers for down fill) in the lower bowl.
“We only had a short window to complete the design and installation once the athletics department gave us the go-ahead,” says Joe Schuch, vice president of Baker AV. “We had a similarly short window at Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves, where Danley Sound Labs delivered over 400 custom loudspeakers within six weeks to make that job a success.
“At Bryant-Denny, we worked with Mike Hedden, Danley president, on a solution that would work within the constraints of the existing infrastructure,” he continues. “There was not enough time to engineer new solutions or to modify loudspeaker locations. We worked through Danley’s catalog of form factors to build an appropriate solution.”
In part because Danley builds all of its loudspeakers and subwoofers in the U.S., it was able to meet the deadlines of the project while simultaneously meeting deadlines for another project at Churchill Downs, homoe of the Kentucky Derby. Hedden reports that the company produced 400 to 500 loudspeakers in just four weeks.
The upper bowl now gets coverage from forty distributed Danley OS-80 weatherproof loudspeakers (two at each of 20 locations), which will remain impervious to the elements for decades to come. Every other OS-80 cluster is paired with a Danley OS-115LF weatherproof subwoofer for low-end support.
The lower bowl uses 24 clusters, each comprised of a Danley SH-96HO for main coverage and a Danley OS-80 for downfill directly below the main loudspeakers. The OS-80 is rolled off at 250 Hz and thus primarily aids in spoken word intelligibility.
After a few days tuning the system, Baker AV and Danley specialists fired it up. “The Athletics Department thinks it’s a night and day improvement,” Schuch says. “The Danley system is more musical and has better intelligibility. The low-end output throughout the stadium blew them away.”
Hedden adds, “With the Danley system, Bryant-Denny gets better coverage, higher output, greater fidelity, and deeper bass all with a fraction of the cabinets, (38 Danley Synergy Horns replaced 128 line array cabinets) weight was reduced by several tons, and our system required 52 less amplifiers and signal processing than the old system.”
