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Atlanta, GA Atlanta, GA A complement of sixty-seven Apogee
loudspeakers, including thirty-six AE-5s, twenty-six AE-5NCs and
five AE-2s were selected to provide coverage in the Olympic Stadium
for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.The
speakers are mounted on custom designed stanchions with adjustable
swivel mounts, located at the rear of the seating
areas and facing inward. The installation of the speakers, cabling,
amplification and rigging hardware represented a
massive effort on the part of Burns Audio, as they struggled to
perform their work around a schedule of heavy
construction, rain delays and logistics that would frighten a
Philadelphia lawyer. As the installation neared completion,
Ken DeLoria, president and developer of the CORREQT tuning
system (Computer Optimized Room Resonant
EQualisation Technique), was flown in to perform system adjustments,
insuring that all seating areas would be well
covered with minimal differential between the nearest and farthest
locations.
The initial speaker layout was developed by Burns Audio staff
engineers with factory assistance from Apogee's Pat
Price, who developed extensive computer work-ups on the predicted
performance of the system. Design specifications
were originated by Ron Baker of the WJHW consulting firm in Dallas,
Texas. The area of coverage was 44,000 seats
and the infield area.
Speakers were 110 feet in the air (the scoreboard was 132 feet
in the air) and installed using a 144 foot crane. 5 separate
amp rooms were designated and cabled for power, program and fiber
optic amplifier control. Cable runs were
semi-permanent, surface runs as the entire system would be removed
upon the completion of the games. Two sections (4
speaker positions) also had to be able to be removed for opening
ceremonies and re-installed overnight for activities
beginning the following day. Final system installation, testing,
time aligning, power balancing and equalization was
performed by Ken DeLoria, President of Apogee, assisted by Bill
Daly of Solar Sound Services Hawaii. Daly's
responsibilities included final installation and tuning to match
the engineering standard as established by ASC (Atlanta
Stadium Construction) and WJHW. Uniform coverage needed to provide
measurement variances of less than -1.5 dB
and +1.0 dB @ 1kHz for all covered area seats. Balancing the Burns
installation to match not only the specifications as
well as the permanently installed EAW system was no small task.
Using CORREQT, the system was tuned and time
aligned to behave as a coherent single sounding source. In the
end, the team's work was well worth the effort. "The
system produces sound that must be heard to be believed,"
says Bruce Burns, president of Burns Audio. The distributed
speaker system provides even coverage, great musicality and excellent
freedom from wind-related performance
degradation-and behaves like a huge array.