Rooms
Sound systems for school gyms and auditoriums
A gym is built for games and used for everything else — assemblies, graduations, a full house on a Friday night. Every one of those depends on people understanding what is said.
What goes wrong in a gym
A gym is hard surfaces from top to bottom: a hardwood floor, block or brick walls, a steel roof deck. That is exactly right for basketball and exactly wrong for a voice. Sound keeps bouncing long after it leaves the speaker, and the echo blurs the words in an announcement.
Most school gyms make it worse with where the speakers are. A few boxes on the walls at court level blast the nearest bleachers, fire across the floor at head height and hit the far wall, so most of the crowd is listening to a reflection. A central horn cluster puts most of its energy onto the floor and the roof. Either way, the fix people reach for is more volume, and more volume only feeds the echo.
Then there is the system nobody can run: gear in a locked closet, a power sequence one retired teacher understood, or a ceiling full of speakers that stopped working years ago and never got replaced. At Hutton Arena, the horn system in the roof had been dead for years and four wall-mounted speakers at court level were doing all the work.
How we approach it
We model the room before anything is ordered. Coverage is predicted in L-Acoustics Soundvision against the real seating — bleachers, balcony, the floor when it is set for an assembly — and the loudspeakers are aimed at people rather than at the floor and walls. In a gym that usually means flying the main boxes and pointing them at the stands.
Everything is rigged back to real structure. Gym roofs are steel trusses, and we confirm what each pickup point can carry before anything goes up. When the drawings do not answer the question, a structural engineer does.
The install crew works from a hang schedule, not from a drawing they have to interpret: every position measured from reference lines on the floor, with a height, a tilt and an aim for every box. Then the system is tuned against measurements, so the result does not depend on whoever was in the room on the last day.
Built for whoever is on shift
The person running sound at a school is rarely an audio engineer. It is the athletic director, a student worker, a teacher setting up for an assembly. So the system has to start, run and shut down without anyone needing to understand it.
That means simple control: at Hutton Arena, an iPad panel built in Allen & Heath Custom Control, with buttons to power the amplifiers on and off. It also means wireless microphones that are ready when someone picks one up, labelled inputs, documentation, and a handover to the people who will actually use it.
Auditoriums
An auditorium is a different room with the same users. It has to carry a principal at a podium, a band concert and a spring musical, often on the same week, and it is usually run by students. That calls for even coverage from the front row to the back and up into any balcony, a system tuned for both speech and music, and presets that make each of those a button rather than a project.
The closest work on this site is in performance rooms: see sound systems for theaters and music venues for how we handle coverage, rigging and commissioning there.
Hutton Arena, Hamline University
Hamline University’s basketball and volleyball arena in Saint Paul was ours from the model to the handover. Four L-Acoustics A10i arrays, each with an SB18i subwoofer alongside, fly either side of the court and aim outward at the bleachers. Two X12 cover the court from directly above, two X8i reach the south balcony, and ten X6i fill the perimeter. An Allen & Heath AHM-32 runs it all, and staff control it from the iPad panel. The install took about 80 hours.
Read the Hutton Arena case study
Questions we get asked
Can the work happen around our schedule? It has to. The athletic season and the academic calendar set the window, and we plan the install around them. The disruptive work is done when the building is free, and we tell you before the contract if any date is at risk.
Do we have to replace everything? Not always. Sometimes the speakers are fine and the problem is aim, processing or a dead amplifier. We would rather tell you that than sell you a system you do not need. And when the honest answer is that the old system is past saving, we will say that too.
Can our staff and students run it? That is the design brief, not an afterthought. Power, volume and the common setups go on a simple panel, and we train the people who will be using it.
Can you hang from our roof? That is what the site walk is for. We rig to structure we can verify, and if the drawings do not settle it, a structural engineer looks at it before anything is ordered.
We have to put this out to bid. Can you work with that? Yes. We bid public work, with a performance bond and AIA billing where the job calls for it. See bid and spec work.
Related
Tell us about the room.
Send over the venue, the date and roughly what you need. We read every request and reply with real questions, not a form letter.