Fulcrum Acoustic Brings Big Sound to Texas High School Mega-StadiumTwo years in the making, the Katy Independent School District's $72-million Legacy Stadium serves more than 77,000 students from the suburban Houston, Texas district's eight high schools. The 12,000-seat, major-league caliber sports venue hosts football, soccer, and lacrosse games, as well as marching band competitions, concerts, and community events. Idibri senior consultant Ryan Knox considered centering sound to be the mega-stadium project's biggest challenge, and chose Fulcrum Acoustic loudspeakers as an integral part of his distributed sound system solution. Challenges included:
* Precise directional control was essential to keep sound from overlapping with the existing 9,800-seat Rhodes Stadium next door on the school's sports campus
* Extremely durable weather-resistant loudspeakers were required to combat Texas heat and extreme weather "To keep sound within the bowl, I designed a distributed system with 18 weatherized Fulcrum GX1295-WR loudspeakers pole mounted at the top of the seating areas, and a half dozen more mounted through portals in the canopy above seating on one side of the field," explains Knox. "Nine Fulcrum AH96-WR coaxial horns were also pole mounted above the stands, with six more integrated in the press box canopy. The AH96s' low frequency extension to below 80Hz helped to simplify the system's design by eliminating the need for separate subwoofers." Knox specified Fulcrum Acoustic's extremely durable, weather-resistant WR Series loudspeakers to withstand Texas' challenging environment. In an early test, Fulcrum's WR speakers weathered their first storm when all Legacy Stadium's week one high school football games were postponed due to Hurricane Harvey. HKS Architects brought Idibri to the project after collaborating with them on a number of other stadiums. HKS provided Legacy Stadium's sleek, contemporary design, and AV systems integrator Covenant Communications installed its high-coverage, distributed audio system. 
|
