Brigham Young University’s Marriott Center in Provo, Utah has the largest seating capacity of any basketball arena in the Big 12 Conference and the eighth-largest seating capacity of any on-campus basketball arena in the United States, accommodating nearly 18,000 fans. What’s also big about the Marriott Center is its sound, as its quality has always been an important part of making the venue desirable for both fans and ballplayers. Over a decade ago, the University installed an L-Acoustics Kara PA system there that added a heightened sonic dimension for the BYU Cougars men’s and women’s basketball teams that call the venue home. In 2024, the Marriott Center did it again, this time installing a new L-Acoustics K2 system in time for the new college hoops season.
“The venue has sounded great for over a decade, but they wanted it to sound even bigger,” says Bryce Stettler, AV System Designer and Project Engineer at Poll Sound, the Salt Lake City-based integration firm that handled both projects. He notes that BYU was intimately familiar with L-Acoustics sound quality, given the arena’s prior Kara system, plus a dV-DOSC system installed at BYU’s 1,200-seat DeJong Concert Hall in 2009. “They wanted a more full-range sound to accommodate more kinds of music and L-Acoustics K2 was the perfect choice.”
The new sound system was primarily designed by Brad Streeter, Director of Audio Visual Services at BYU’s Office of Information Technology, in consultation with L-Acoustics engineers, and installed by Poll Sound, which also assisted with commissioning, tuning, and calibration. “Our primary motivation for upgrading to the K2 was headroom, particularly for sporting events, to be able to get above the noise of the crowd – led by BYU’s ROC [Roar of Cougars] student section – without overdriving the system. The additional headroom was needed without sacrificing sound quality and intelligibility,” says Streeter, adding that the arena is a multi-use facility that hosts a wide range of events, including a weekly campus-wide devotional, University commencement, music concerts, and dance performances.
The latest L-Acoustics installation comprises eight arrays of nine K2 each, which address the arena’s lower bowl seating below the concourse and are powered by LA12X amplified controllers. Coverage of the seating above the concourse is handled by 16 delayed arrays of one Kilo over five Kiva, each powered by recently-upgraded LA4X, while two arrays of six repurposed Kara enclosures flown adjacent to the central scoreboard cover the court floor. The system is rounded out by a pair of P1 processors, which feed signals to the amps and speakers over Milan-AVB.
Although most of the Kara from the previous system have been repurposed at other venues on campus, the delay speakers and subwoofers from the earlier installation remain in place. Speaking of low end, Stettler notes that K2’s ability to reach effortlessly down to 35 Hz has added tremendously to basketball’s bass-heavy culture there. “So much full range coming from each one of those arrays has been really helpful in maintaining the low end everywhere,” he says. “We’re actually getting a lot more low frequency reinforcement from the K2.”
The Marriott Center needed more impact for music and sound effects for games, as college basketball has become as much about entertainment as it is sport, but Stettler points out that the venue is also used for a number of other applications, such as live events, and those especially needed enhanced speech intelligibility. “In addition to impact for the games, they were also looking to enhance the sound of events held there,” he says, “so it was a big deal to keep it to where speech was really intelligible, especially for larger crowds.”
Brad Streeter, who also designed the sound for Brigham Young University’s School of Music Building, competed in 2023, says the school has its own engineering team that has the depth to design the audio for venues such as these, as well as the ability to do much of its own systems integration, relying on Poll Sound as a partner for these kinds of larger projects. For the new system update at the Marriott Center, he says they were able to largely follow the same design as the previous system, for box location and positioning. “What’s great about L-Acoustics is that we knew what to expect from the new system, in terms of coverage and performance quality, even before it was installed thanks to Soundvision and our prior experience with Kara,” he says. “We knew going in that the K2 system would sound and perform great, which really gave us confidence in making this investment.”
Stettler says the Marriott Center is emblematic of college sports venues becoming more attuned to sports as a form of entertainment, with the need for more full-range sound. “We’ve spent a lot of time educating our bigger university clients as to the difference in a premium system like L-Acoustics, and now they’re starting to realize that there is a big difference in that,” he says. “They’re becoming a lot more aware of the brands that have become important in entertainment and that are finding their way into sports, more recently at the college level. This is a market that wants the same kind of sound that you come to expect from concert tours and professional sports, and L-Acoustics certainly provides that.”
Join the ISE25 Hunt for your Perfect Pair
To join the hunt, visitors should download the Scavify app from the App Store or Google Play, search for “ISE25” in the Scavify app and unlock the hunt.
The company’s narrowband digital solutions Digital 6000 and EW-DX with the new four-channel Dante receiver will also be on display, with an associated “mic play table” providing guests with the rare opportunity to try out all available Sennheiser and Neumann capsules with a handheld, as well as head-worn and lavalier mics with a bodypack transmitter to find the ideal combo for their voice. Listening is via the Sennheiser HD 490 PRO and Neumann NDH 30 studio headphones.
Visitors will also experience Merging’s cutting-edge Dante®-enabled ecosystem, featuring the Hapi Mk III, Anubis, and MT 48, seamlessly integrated with the Pyramix 15 DAW. This setup demonstrates how Merging is advancing audio production, offering unmatched precision, scalability, and flexibility in networked environments.