Case study
Hutton Arena: a college gym, ours from the model to the handover
Hamline University’s basketball and volleyball arena, where the job was to put sound on the seats instead of on the steel and the hardwood.
- Location Saint Paul, MN
- Project type Sound system design-build
- Replaced Four wall-mounted powered speakers at court level; a horn system out of service for years
- Our role Design, installation, tuning & commissioning
- System L-Acoustics A10i, SB18i, X12, X8i and X6i on an Allen & Heath AHM-32
The room
Hutton Arena is Hamline University’s home court for basketball and volleyball, in Saint Paul. It is a classic college gym: a hardwood floor, masonry walls, an exposed steel-truss roof, bleachers down both sides of the court and a balcony at the south end.
Every one of those surfaces reflects sound. That is the whole problem with a gym: an announcement can be plenty loud and still be hard to follow, because most of what reaches you has already bounced off the floor and the roof.
The problem
Before this, the arena ran on four powered speakers mounted to the walls at court level. The horn system up in the roof had not worked for years.
Speakers at court level are about the worst place to put sound in a gym. The seats nearest each box get blasted, the sound carries on across the court at head height and hits the far wall, and anyone further away hears mostly that reflection. Turning it up only makes the room louder, not clearer.
The design
This one was ours from the start. We modelled the room in L-Acoustics Soundvision and designed the system around the seats rather than the court.
Four arrays fly either side of the centreline, each aimed outward at the bleachers instead of down at the floor, so the energy lands on people rather than on hardwood. Each array is three A10i — one Focus over two Wide — with an SB18i subwoofer flown alongside. Two X12 hang on the centreline pointing straight down to cover the court itself, two X8i are aimed back over the south wall to reach the balcony, and ten X6i fill the perimeter, five a side.
The design went to the install crew as a hang schedule rather than a drawing to interpret: every position measured from two reference lines marked on the court floor, with a height, a tilt and an aim for each of the 26 full-range enclosures.
The install
The arrays hang from the roof steel on A10i bumpers, two motors to an array, with the bumper pickups just over 29 feet above the court. The X6i fills sit lower, under the timber overhang along each side, where they can reach the seats the arrays cannot see.
The install took about 80 hours in total.
Tuning and control
Everything is driven from one rack: an Allen & Heath AHM-32 processor feeding L-Acoustics LA4X amplifiers and an LA1.16i. We tuned and commissioned the system ourselves — the same people who drew it — so nothing was lost between the model and the room.
A gym’s sound system is run by whoever is on shift: athletic staff, student workers, whoever is setting up for tonight’s game. So day-to-day control is an iPad panel we built in Allen & Heath Custom Control, with buttons that power the amplifiers on and off. Nobody has to find the rack, or know what is in it, to get a game started.
The system
- Four L-Acoustics A10i arrays, three boxes each
- Four L-Acoustics SB18i subwoofers
- Two X12 court fills, two X8i balcony fills and ten X6i perimeter fills
- L-Acoustics LA4X and LA1.16i amplification
- Allen & Heath AHM-32 processing with a Custom Control iPad panel
- Shure SLXD wireless microphones
Related
Tell us about the room.
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