Amon G. Carter Stadium, Texas Christian University

Context

The Team

More with Less for a Big-12 NCAA Stadium 

Amon G. Carter Stadium, home to Texas Christian University’s Horned Frogs Big 12 football team, underwent a $118 million expansion in 2019. Among its many improvements, the first phase of this multi-year initiative notably involved a significant upgrade of the nearly 50,000-capacity stadium’s video and audio capabilities. A few years before, the university installed a Kara system at Rosenthal Soccer Stadium, home to the popular Lady Frogs women’s soccer team. Now, the “other kind of football” stadium wanted concert-grade sound. 

The Challenge

For the redesign, priority had been placed on the visually exciting elements and not on the real estate needed for an acoustic system powerful enough to cover the 650 feet from the scoreboard to the end zone. In this case, a massive 100+ foot wide and 50-foot-tall video board took most of the space, leaving less than eight vertical feet in the area above the display to hang the loudspeaker arrays. Additionally, the old system had been much larger, so this was a true case of having to do more with less; after collaborating with the architect to get four more feet in height for the arrays, though an improvement, space was still extremely tight.

The Solution

“With such tight space constraints, we needed a fairly compact loudspeaker system that could still throw 500 feet and push 95 to 98db at that distance when needed. After several planning sessions, we decided on K1, which to my knowledge is the only solution on the market that could check off each of those required boxes for us,” said Ryan Walker, Account Manager for Electro Acoustics. This unusual but effective configuration consisted of three arrays of K1 right next to each other. K1, with its extremely high input, was the only choice for this configuration.

System pictures

The Result

Everyone who has heard the new configuration swears it’s louder than the old one. Walker attributes this to the sonic improvement, that’s immediately noticeable even to untrained ears. “Everyone notices the clarity of the L-Acoustics system, which is so much better than what was in there previously,” he says. “The funny thing is that everyone thinks that this system is louder than the old one. It’s certainly capable of being much louder, but they’re now averaging between 88 and 90dB for games, which is actually quieter than they ran their old rig. Plus, the comment that I’ve heard over and over is, ‘I can finally understand what the announcers and refs are saying!’”  

Project photos