July 20, 2010
AV Is A Major Player In Large Stadium Projects
The national economy’s apparent
gradual recovery from a long and
deep recession is obviously a welcome
development. But for AV integrators,
consultants, and manufacturers,
things haven’t been all bad: while
hardly recession-proof, the recent
wave of stadium projects has kept
the industry busy. With economic
data improving, systems professionals
are eyeing the future with cautious
optimism.
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At the new Cowboys Stadium, Clearwing Productions conducted the
design and installation of two 40- x 33-foot Barco LED walls and control
playback system, along with automated lighting, conventional
dimming, and rigging of custom-fabricated scenic elements for the
stadium’s Miller Lite Landing and event-level clubs. Media server and control consisted of Barco High End Systems Axon Media Servers.
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To be sure, economic conditions
have delayed or downsized some projects.
The conception-to-completion
span of a stadium, however, means a
lag between an economic “event” and
its impact on a project. “Just as there
was a lag for it to start falling off, there
is a lag for it to start picking up again,”
observed Bradford Benn, Crown
International’s director of application
engineering. One consequence of the
recession, he added, is that “people are
looking at the networking and saying
‘How can I put this all together so that
I can save my overall base building
costs?’ Before, it used to be ‘I have this
dollar amount for audio and this dollar
amount for base building.’ Now,
it’s ‘I have this much money total. How
can I stretch it?’”
“People are still spending money
at the stadium level, but trying to
be smarter about it,” added Daniel
Gourley, design and build manager for
Clearwing Productions. “They may be
renting more than doing a permanent
fixed install. We’ve been seeing an
uptick as far as doing a one-off or twotime
big halftime show as opposed to
‘Let’s install a new video wall,’ or a
multi-plasma kind of setup.”
Still, recent stadium projects have
stayed true to state-of-the-art and
“wow-factor” design. Cowboys Stadium,
the new home of the Dallas
Cowboys, is indicative of industry
trends, said Ethan Wetzell, product
manager, Electro-Voice Signal Processing,
Bosch Communications Systems,
which provided a large portion
of the audio infrastructure.
“One of the critical aspects of that
project,” said Wetzell, “was the ability
to have extensive monitoring and
supervision of the entire system. The
sheer scope and size of the PA and the
installed system as a whole makes it a
real necessity for a user, a contractor,
a consultant—anybody who touches
the system—to have a real interactive
perspective with the system.”
Bosch employed its NetMax system,
with which, Wetzell explained,
“an operator is able to sit at a central
point and supervise, monitor, control, configure, and access any
portion of the system, in real time, as
they need to. They can check on the
health of the electronics, the amplifiers,
the signal processing. Even the
loudspeaker and the cable lines can
all be monitored and supervised over
the network to come back.
“The AV industry is beginning to
transition to a model where they’re
offering services in addition to products
or designs,” Wetzell continued.
“This really gives them a great toolset
to offer ongoing maintenance, ongoing
supervision, and really expand
that service portfolio that they have
to be able to offer to their end-users
and customers.”
Clearwing Productions also made
a sizable contribution to the Cowboys
Stadium experience. The Milwaukeeand
Phoenix-based company was
contracted by GMR Marketing on
behalf of Miller Coors to develop the
design and installation of two 40- x
33-foot Barco LED walls and control playback
system, along with automated
lighting, conventional dimming, and
rigging of custom-fabricated scenic
elements for the stadium’s Miller Lite
Landing and event-level clubs.
Content is served from the broadcast
control center, more than 2,000
feet away, by Barco High End Systems’ Axon
Media Servers, controlled via a Whole
Hog III console. “For the tactile,
instantaneous control of a football
game, and also triggering all these
elements together, it was the best solution
for the job,” Gourley explained.
“Logistically we had to figure out how
to put a feed of video chain through
the in-house fiber, and also hang
these walls and get that working. The
complicated part was, they brought
in another manufacturer that was
building a 100- x 50-foot sign. By the
time we all got done, it weighed about
26,000 pounds.”
Clearwing employed Color Kinetics
iColor Accent Powercore LED
fixtures. “We were contracted to
take the sign that somebody else was
manufacturing, run all of our wiring
through it, and array these LEDs
throughout the sign,” said Gourley.
“Those LEDs are driven by either a
lighting console or video itself. So
you have a very flexible display surface
that you can put anywhere. We
ended up with about 48,000 LEDs.
“The fun part of that is, we were
now controlling this entire sign from
the control room. You have one place,
basically, generating video content.
The same position is also generating
lighting content to this big sign.”
With subsidiary companies TSI
Group and TSI Engineered Systems
working hand in hand, TSI-Global
offers an example of one-stop service:
it has landed a number of stadium
projects including Busch Stadium in its
St. Louis, MO hometown, Citi Field in
Queens, NY, Target Field in Minneapolis,
MN, and the new Consol Energy
Center, opening this fall as the new
home of the Pittsburgh Penguins. TSI
also recently completed a renovation
upgrade to the St. Louis Rams’ Russell
Training Center (formerly Rams Park).
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The digital audio distribution infrastructure at the new Target Field stadium in Minneapolis, MN uses BSS Audio Soundweb London products networked with Crown and JBL equipment, all controlled
via Harman HiQnet. Alpha Video’s Sports & Entertainment Group designed and integrated the replay control room that drives one of the largest high-definition video boards in the Midwest.
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“We started the AV division about
nine years ago,” said VP Paul Murdick.
“We started out doing typical small
AV integration with corporate and
some higher education, some industrial
paging, and grew from there with the contract of Busch Stadium, [for
which] we supplied the voice and data
cabling, the installation of the audio
and SMATV system, and the broadcast
system. In the past four years we
have grown quite a bit—from 15 in
the office to about 50.”
Manufacturers in the AV industry,
Murdick observed, “are building
ways and means to transport the AV
on fiber, instead of giving it from a
fiber distributor. The AV manufacturer
is really jumping on board as
far as supplying means to do so.”
“Some people decide to go digital all
the way to the amp,” Benn explained,
“and some have gone digital in processing.
[Target Field] is very much stateof-
the-art in terms of digital audio
and using the [BSS Audio] Soundweb
products as well as the Crown products
together on one control system.
There are other approaches that are a
little more expensive, such as at Meadowlands,
where it’s CobraNet directly
to the amplifier.”
While CobraNet remains the
most prominent audio distribution
solution in stadiums, many IT professionals
are confident in Audio
Video Bridging (AVB) architecture,
Benn maintained, “because it’s an
IEEE standard. It’s based on 802.1,
the ethernet standard, and is just an
advancement of it. We’ve been working
on it for a few years, drawing all
the experience we’ve had with projects
such as Target, Meadowlands, Lucas
Oil Stadium [Indianapolis, IN], as
well as theme park projects and even
smaller projects like restaurants and
retail spaces. It’s not a brand-new
start; it’s the next evolution.”
State-of-the-art audio and video
infrastructure is even seen at the college
level. “It’s definitely starting to
trickle down to some of the larger
colleges,” Benn observed. “There
are a few stadiums out there that
have CobraNet and connectivity and
control on the entire system, based
on the same idea: it makes life easier
to have a control system and have it
all networked together. The thing
that’s really been driving a lot of it
is, by networking it together they’re
able to lower the cost of ownership,
whereas it used to be ‘I need eight
people to look at all this stuff.’ Now,
the network can look at the system
for them and proactively tell them
what’s going on.”
Though “convergence” has been
uttered ad nauseam in recent years,
it becomes more of a reality every
day, these professionals say. “The
way of just being a standard AV contractor
is going away,” said Gourley,
“where you’re dealing just with video
switching systems or remote speaker
systems, and having just one chain of
interaction whether it’s serial control
or contact closure. We’re getting to a
very IT-centric, all-worlds-mixingtogether,
one-panel approach, and
multiple protocols talking.”
One advantage that results from
this transition towards networkbased
and IT-centric infrastructure,
Wetzell added, is that “it goes a long
way in allowing people to do retrofits
and gradual upgrades over time,
because so much of the core of those
projects is infrastructure. When you
get everything that’s able to exist on
a common backbone on that infrastructure,
both for control as well as
audio distribution—certainly as well
as video distribution—it gives a lot of
leverage and possibility to be able to
expand more gradually. As they bring
in new, modern components, they can
continue to tie them in to a common
infrastructure. So they’re expanding
control, functionality, and capabilities,
but at the same time increasing
the ease of use, the quality of both the
service and the product they can offer,
and keeping the cost of the project
down, because they’re saving some of
that infrastructure cost.”
Margin builder
One advantage that results from the transition towards network-based and IT-centric infrastructure
is that it allows people to do retrofits and gradual upgrades over time, because so much of the core
of those projects is infrastructure. “As they bring in new, modern components, they can continue
to tie them in to a common infrastructure,” said Ethan Wetzell of Bosch Communications Systems.
“So they’re expanding control, functionality, and capabilities, but at the same time increasing the
ease of use, the quality of both the service and the product they can offer, and keeping the cost of
the project down, because they’re saving some of that infrastructure cost.”
Christopher Walsh (chrisink@live.com) is a New York-based journalist, musician, and recording engineer.
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