Finley Stadium Audio Upgrade

A stadium sound system has one job that is harder than it sounds: every seat should hear the announcer clearly at the same level, whether it is in the front row or the far corner of the visitor side. Finley Stadium asked us to replace an aging system with one that could do that, and to bring the concourses, restrooms, and press box along with it.

The main arrays are mounted inside the video-board enclosure. Each side of the stadium is covered by a pair of Community LVH-900 beamforming horns for the far seating and an R2 loudspeaker for the near seats, supplemented by six subwoofers for the low end that a modern stadium expects. The design holds coverage across the seating within 3 dB through the voice band, which is what keeps speech intelligible from end to end. The rigging was engineered and PE-stamped, and a Community factory representative handled the final calibration on site.

Seven wall speakers on the visitor concourse and fourteen restroom speakers were replaced on existing wiring, powered by a mix of new amplification and two of the stadium's newer amplifiers put back to work. The head end runs on Biamp Tesira processing with Dante networking over Netgear AV switches, so audio moves between the rack, the amplifiers, and the booth as data.

In the press box, a Yamaha DM3-D Dante mixing console replaced the old board and can be run from an iPad with the StageMix app. A Shure four-channel wireless system with two handhelds and two headsets, a high-powered antenna, and a new push-to-talk announcer microphone round out the booth.

The stadium agreed to let us and Community Loudspeakers feature the installation as a case study, which is why the professional photos here also cover the Skybox and Ultra Club areas.