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Tag: Brigham Young University

  • BYU Marriott Center Makes a Long Throw Look Easy with L-Acoustics K2 Professional Sound System

    BYU Marriott Center Makes a Long Throw Look Easy with L-Acoustics K2 Professional Sound System

    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.”

  • BYU’s New School of Music Building Doubles the Immersive Sound Experience with Two L-ISA Systems

    BYU’s New School of Music Building Doubles the Immersive Sound Experience with Two L-ISA Systems

    Construction of Brigham Young University’s new School of Music Building took two years to complete, and it was worth the wait. The 170,000-square-foot center was built to house BYU School of Music’s performance and academic spaces and relieve some of the burden on the university’s Harris Fine Arts Center, which hosted over 500 performances a year before its demolition this past March, paving the way for a new Arts Building to be completed on the same site in 2025.

    The new Music Building has four levels and features several mid-sized spaces for rehearsals and recitals, including practice rooms on the upper floor. The cornerstone of the facility is a 1,000-seat Concert Hall built in the vineyard style in which the performance space takes center stage, with tiers of audience seating rising above them.

    Helping to put this new center, which is part of BYU’s College of Fine Arts and Communications, at the cutting edge of music performance is the inclusion of two L-Acoustics L-ISA immersive sound systems: one in the Recital Hall performance space and the other in a teaching space, The Box, both installed by Salt Lake City-based Poll Sound Integration, who also installed an L-Acoustics Kiva II system into the building’s new Concert Hall. The ability to move between teaching and performance spaces and remain in a fully immersive environment sets a new benchmark for immersive audio in education.

    Both the Recital Hall and The Box are fitted with L-ISA immersive audio technology. The Box was initially envisioned as an opera rehearsal room, but including L-ISA has allowed it become a much more versatile performance space, now used for classes, rehearsals, and immersive audio composition groups. Kevin Anthony, assistant professor in the composition department and an electronic music composer, says the decision to outfit both spaces with immersive audio emerged from discussions amongst the AV team and faculty members who saw that L-ISA technology could greatly increase the flexibility of those spaces.

    “It was exactly what we need for much of the electronic music that our students produce,” he says. “And we also want to be able to host electronic music conferences here, so having L-ISA immersive sound was precisely what we required.” Asked if immersive audio had made inroads into academic settings yet, as it has in cinema and other sectors, Anthony replied that this was the first such installation he’d seen. “It’s a dream setup to have,” he says.

    That “dream setup” in the Recital Hall consists of five A10i Focus and ten A10i Wide loudspeakers plus six KS21 subs, eight coaxial X8, and 15 ultra-shallow Soka colinear enclosures, collectively driven by a combination of LA12X and LA4X amplified controllers and an L-ISA Processor. In The Box, the immersive speaker array comprises five Syva colinear loudspeakers, two KS21 subs, and 21 X8, all controlled by an L-ISA Processor and powered by LA4X amplified controllers. Equally nice is the new Concert Hall’s sound system, with its 24 flown Kiva II speakers buttressed by five A10i Focus, five A10i Wide, and six SB15m subs, all driven by LA12X amps and a P1 processor. In addition, four rehearsal rooms each utilize two self-powered 108P and a pair of SB15P subs; a dozen classrooms all feature two 108P; and a portable PA system comprising a combination of X8, X12, and KS21, powered via LA12X and LA4X, is ready for deployment as needed.

    BYU Director of Audio Visual Services Brad Streeter, who designed all of the new facility’s sound systems in concert with L-Acoustics technicians and Poll Sound AV System Designer/Project Engineers Neil Yates and Bryce Stettler, and PM Dan Salmond, noted that research around immersive sound for the new facility extended beyond the new music facility.

    “We were doing AV design work for two buildings concurrently: the Music Building, which was begun and completed first, and a new Arts Building currently under construction. We were also researching immersive systems for the Arts Building, experiencing different manufacturers’ demos at trade shows,” he explains. “We had evaluated several of the products, and we all felt the L-Acoustics L-ISA technology was the best fit for the proscenium theater in the new Arts Building, and the research showed it was also relevant to the spaces in the Music Building.”

    Reaction to the new immersive audio capabilities in the facility has been highly positive. Anthony says they’ve been used for applications ranging from teaching to composition to performance, all while introducing students to the concept of immersive audio. “One of our grad students, Jinxin Fu, is composing a piece specifically to be performed using L-ISA, and several other music students are taking advantage of its real-time spatialization capabilities in an upcoming concert,” he says. “Composition faculty member Steve Ricks just staged a large-scale opera performance in The Box where I designed a ‘weather’ system with sounds of trees and other natural effects that were spatialized throughout the space. It was cool to see that space and the sound system used to its full measure.”

    BYU is far from finished with L-Acoustics technology. Bryce Stettler, in charge of commercial sales at Poll Sound, noted that the company is gearing up to install a new K2 system in the Marriott Center, the multipurpose arena on the university’s Provo campus that is home to BYU Cougars men’s and women’s basketball teams. With seating for nearly 18,000 people, it is the largest venue in the entire Big 12 Conference and among the largest on-campus basketball arenas in the nation. “We look forward to doing it again when we finish the new K2 system with all of the required rigging and support gear in the Marriott Center, as well as for the upcoming new Arts Building on the campus when it’s finished,” he says. “L-Acoustics has technology and systems for each school’s needs.”

    In the meantime, BYU’s music faculty is still finding new ways to apply the L-ISA immersive technology to their work. They anticipate making it part of the learning and performance experience in the new facility. “I think as far as these systems are concerned, they’re new to us and a new technology for campus,” says Anthony. “But we’re looking forward to doing a lot of experimentation and seeing where it’ll be most useful, and that’s tremendously exciting.”