Community R-Series loudspeakers chosen for stadium

Central Washington’s Yakima Valley SunDome stadium upgrades its out of date sound system using Community Pro products.

The 6,195-seat stadium hosts touring concerts, basketball, wrestling and volleyball tournaments, truck-pulls, trade shows and other regional events.

Leo Lee, owner and general manager of Sousley Sound & Communications explains some of the problems with the SunDome’s previous sound system: "The SunDome was built in the 1990s, and at the time it was fairly typical to install centre-cluster loudspeaker systems in domed stadiums." To achieve the volume levels needed, the cluster system was throwing sound too far, causing major reverberation problems within the SunDome’s largely concrete environment. "Most centre-cluster technology isn’t able to meet the current audio demands for a venue like the SunDome."

The city of Yakima contracted Sousley Sound & Communications to design and install a new distributed audio system capable of providing the zoned coverage needed for the venue’s various events. The newly commissioned system includes 24 Community R-Series loudspeakers and six iHP Series dual 15-inch subwoofers. The weather-resistant R-series is a popular choice for outdoor venues and is frequently selected by designers for indoor arenas and other reverberant spaces because of its sound projection, pattern control, and clarity.

13 Ashly Audio amplifiers power the loudspeakers, with matrix routing and configuration pre-sets provided by Ashly Protea DSPs. The system also includes Community’s new dSPEC226 loudspeaker processor.

The dSPEC is an Ethernet-controlled processor that is designed to provide the standard functions expected of a high-quality DSP, while implementing a number of unique features to speed up the process of system configuration, multi-level limiter setting, and system commissioning. Among these is the first commercial-audio application of RealSoundLab’s CONEQ technology. Effectively a high-resolution tuning tool, as implemented in dSPEC, CONEQ processing provides loudspeaker pre-sets that optimize frequency response while making each speaker’s sound-field more consistent.

"We’ve received many accolades about the new audio system," said Lee. "You can hear every word clearly no matter where you sit in the arena. The sound distribution is exceptionally even. We’re very pleased, and more importantly, the SunDome management is very pleased."