Beating the Clock
Apr 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Danny Abelson
Not many college basketball teams can boast the kind of arena that the Badgers of the University of Wisconsin received when the Kohl Center opened this past January in Madison, WI. The 450,000 ft squared (41,805 meter squared), $76 million multi-use facility ($25 million of which came from U. S. senator and businessman Herb Kohl, a 1956 graduate of the university) seats 16,500 Badgers fans and others on three levels below its 90 foot (27 m) ceiling, some of whom are lucky enough to be ensconced in the 36 16-seat luxury suites that dot the structure's interior. The facility features reception halls, a retail store, auxiliary gymnasium and CCTV capabilities.
"Well-planned, coordinated efforts are essential to projects of this scale," observed Al Fish, associate athletic director for the university and a veteran manager of a Big Ten university athletic department. "We chose a design/build approach to go with the fast-track construction scheduling we went with for every aspect of the arena. Construction started in April 1996, and was supposed to be finished by January of this year. The only way we were going to make that deadline was to fast track it, and the reason the design/build approach worked as well as it did was because of a high degree of pre-planning and because everyone on the project worked as a team."
As a result, what normally would have taken three years was accomplished in 21 months. Pre-planning and subcontractor coordination were essential. Fish and the university had chosen the architectural/engineering companies (H.O.K., Kansas City, MO, and Venture Architects, Milwaukee, with lead architect George Heinlein), the project management company (Hammes, Milwaukee) and the construction company (Oscar J. Boldt, Milwaukee) after the university had assembled a comprehensive operations plan for the arena.
Fish said that audio was a major aspect of that plan. "We knew we were going to need a high degree of voice clarity and articulation in a system that was going to go into a very loud building. And because this is a multi-purpose facility, it would have to serve as a very musical system for entertainment events as well, and that's exactly what we got because the Turbosound components were good and the people implementing them worked as a team."
Fish's nearby sound expert was Audio Independence of Middleton, WI, exclusive U.S. distributor for British-made Turbosound system components and MC-Squared power amps, which constitute the majority of the loudspeakers and power amps. Audio Independence president Danny Abelson had worked with Fish in 1994 on the renovation of the university's 80,000-seat Camp Randall Stadium, providing a Turbosound Flashlight sound system installed by a local contractor. When Audio Independence was brought into the Kohl Center project as the sound system components supplier construction was well under way, but Abelson saw from the scope of the project that it required another entity to implement and install the equipment.
The result was the entry of Chicago-area Ancha Electronics, one of the five largest A-V systems installers in the United States. Ancha's purview would be the installation of all broadcast wiring systems-a massive project in and of itself, with more than 400,000 feet (122,000 m) of mic/line cable, 200,000 feet (61,000 m) of loudspeaker wire and 30,000 feet (9,144 m) of triax camera cable-the arena's interior RF and CCTV systems, which Ancha designed based on a university specification, the main PA system supplied by Audio Independence and the arena's auxiliary systems, including paging and media room interface.
"We teamed with Ancha to accomplish what was truly a massive job," remarked Abelson. "The way we both entered the picture dovetailed well with the way the entire construction project was proceeding. Instead of the typical bid-and-spec process that perhaps gives a client the lowest price but not always the best result, Ancha, the University of Wisconsin and the general contractors worked with us to establish a cooperative effort."
Ancha Electronics implemented all of the wire and cabling runs for the entire project and designed and installed the sound system headend around a Peavey MediaMatrix controller run by a Crestron microprocessor system.
"From our point of view, the project needed as much pre-planning as possible," explained Bill Gillette, sales manager for Ancha. "We put in hundreds of thousands of feet of cabling, much of it as concrete was poured, when we were installing conduit. We knew the facility would be an attraction to broadcast operators, so we paid particularly close attention to allowing for good video interfaces, such as the two huge Hoffman boxes containing the video patch panel, which allows TV production trucks to plug into the building's 300-plus video lines."
Sound system install team Audio Independence and Ancha Electronics worked on a design that specified four main clusters dead-hung from the arena's ceiling. The installation of the sound system hinged around semi-weekly team meetings among the principals, anchored by project construction supervisor John Rodell of Badger Sports Development, the joint venture LLC between Boldt and Hammes.
An example of what came from these regular conclaves is found in the arena's ceiling construction from which the four main four-way, fully active clusters of the sound system would hang. The spec called for each of the largest clusters on the north and south ends of the interior 51 feet (15.5 m) apart to be fitted with five Turbosound TSW-721 21 inch (533 mm) bass bins, five Turbosound Flashlight 780 boxes and five Turbo-sound TFL-760HM high/mid downfill enclosures. The east and west clusters, 43 feet (15 m) from each other, consisted of four Turbosound ESW-721 bass enclosures, four Turbosound TFL-768 mid-high enclosures and four Turbo-sound TFL-760HM downfill enclosures.
"The north-south clusters had the longest throw," said Abelson. "But between the four clusters, the design indicated that we could cover the entire lower seating areas right to the edge of the floor."
Audio Independence had computer- modeled the room and combined that with the experience provided by Turbosound's senior design engineer Danny Cooklin and Audio Independence customer service engineer Paul Giansante, who described the Turbo-sound enclosures' response as "incredibly predictable and very tight, with 25 degrees of horizontal dispersion on the TSS-780H cabinets and 50 degrees on the TFL760H enclosures. The modeling program simply backed up what we already knew about the system components' response based on past experience."
The main clusters were augmented by two delay rings consisting of 28 Turbosound Impact 50 two-way enclosures mounted under the upper balcony to cover seats in the direct sonic shadow of the balcony, and a second upper ring consisting of 28 Turbosound TMI-102 12 inch (305 mm) two-way enclosures suspended from the roof to cover upper-deck seating. The 28 separate delay settings were determined by Giansante and Ancha's project manager, Jack McCallum, using a TEF system and range between 60 ms and 120 ms.
The meetings discussed how to keep the sound system faithful to the goals it was given by the various parties, including high articulation, high volume and musicality. The consensus resulted in the choice of a corrugated roofing material 3 inches (76 mm) deep and 6 inches (152 mm) wide with perforations that reveal a fiberglass-filled core.
"That gave us the acoustical softness needed to offset the hard surfaces of the rest of the interior of the arena and provide musicality to the space that the PA system could work with," explained Rodell. "It also gave enough strength to support the size PA that Turbosound had determined would be needed to give the arena the required levels of volume and intelligibility. The ceiling was designed with a 93,000 pound (41,850 kg) live-load capacity."
The system was dead-hung on load-certified Turbosound flybars by rigging contractor Peter Albrecht of Milwaukee, and it went up in just three days. An initial consideration was to mount the cluster on motorized winches for component replacement if necessary. Another outcome of the regular meetings, however, was the determination that based on everyone's experience with Turbosound enclosures in applications such as the university's outdoor football field, the system's reliability eliminated the need for movable clusters.
The MC-Squared power amps for the clusters and delay rings were mounted in the catwalk area above the scoreboard to minimize loudspeaker cable runs and the effects of line loss.
"The MC-Squared MC 450, MC650 and MC1250 amps all have digitally converted front ends, which allows the operator to manage all of them from a single PC screen in the audio control room," explained Abelson.
That control room was another result of teamwork decisions. The initial specification called for sound, video and scoreboard control to be situated in a low seat-loss position above the upper deck, but it was discovered that the difficult access to the location would fail to comply with the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
"It's a perfect example of how coordinating the contracting teams paid off," said McCallum. "The choice of that location made perfect sense from an architectural point of view, and to the facility owners because it was a non-revenue-producing location. Then the ADA issue developed. As a team, we reviewed other possibilities and found that we could share space with a concessions supply room in the south concourse that had a direct line of sight to the floor."
The audio control room features a Crest Century Series console, in addition to a variety of compressors, with a 360 Systems Instant Replay hard disk recorder. An extensive Clear-Com multichannel intercom system provides production communications facilities throughout the building.
The Kohl Center's debut came in the form of a Badgers game on Jan. 17, 1998, and since then, the facility has hosted sporting and entertainment events, all of which have proven that the sound system can meet its specified goal of making the arena a truly multifunction facility.
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