Meyer IntelligentDC solution for Lund Arena, Minnesota

The 1,500-capacity Lund Arena at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, US, has been upgraded with a Meyer Sound system featuring IntelligentDC technology.

Events held at the venue range from ice hockey games to prestigious gatherings such as the Nobel Conference, the first ongoing educational conference in the United States to have the official authorisation of the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden.

“With the Meyer Sound system, we have controlled and uniform sound everywhere, with ample full-bandwidth power and exceptional speech intelligibility,” said Matt Dobosenki, the college’s event technical services coordinator. “With the old system, the sound would build up, overexcite the room and lose coherence. Now it’s clean and has plenty of punch, but it’s never overbearing.”

The solution selected for the arena is a remotely-powered system offering IntelligentDC, which combines the performance advantages of self-powered loudspeakers with the installation efficiency of Class 2 wiring. A single, five-conductor cable carries remote power and balanced audio signal to the loudspeakers from a rack-mount power supply and signal distribution unit. In the US and numerous other countries, electric conduit is not required.

“IntelligentDC technology is ideal for this application,” explained Jon Young, CEO of the system’s supplier and installer Heroic Productions. “We can provide the sound quality you can only get from a self-powered, bi-amplified system, but we don’t need 60 new AC runs up on the roof beams. And with individual control of each speaker, we have total flexibility in zoning the system and balancing the levels. And if the operators want to turn the volume up in the student section twice as loud as the parent section, that’s easily done.”

The Meyer Sound models chosen for the project include 19 UPM-1XP loudspeakers spaced over the ice floor, 20 UPJunior-XP VariO speakers covering the spectator stands and 16 UMS-1XP subwoofers for full-range musical punch, while eight UP-4XP loudspeakers cover an adjacent hallway. Handling system drive, optimisation and zoning is a Galileo loudspeaker management system with two Galileo 616 processors.

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