SOUND SYSTEM FROM BAG END
“I’m just in awe…You just feel better and you feel there’s going to be a lot of support here.”
That was reaction of Coffeyville Community College Sophomore running back Taurus Ferguson the first time he saw the new Veterans Memorial Stadium in this city of 15,000 near the Verdigris River in southeast Kansas. In addition to being the home field for the Coffeyville Community College Red Ravens, the $11 million, 5,500-seat municipally-owned stadium is also the home of the Coffeyville High School Tornadoes.
“This is a tremendous facility,” Coffeyville City Manager Leroy Alsip said. “But we have to keep in mind it’s more than for football. We’ll have track, soccer, band competitions, concerts and festivals here. Our goal is for everyone in the area to get used to coming to Coffeyville to see this facility.” In addition to three stories of VIP suites, press box and broadcast/recording booths, the stadium, which opened last year, features a state of the art artificial surface called Fieldturf, and what the Coffeyville Community College athletic information brochure describes as a “pulsating sound system.”
Brent Baker of Utopian Systems of nearby Joplin, MO, was both the designer and installer of the straightforward but effective sound system. “I was approached by Gary Cartwright of Joplin Industrial Electric, the electrical contractor for the project,” Baker said. “The sound system was a blank budget for a new system, so he left it up to us to design.”
Working from off the blueprints, Baker’s initial design utilized the stadium’s light poles in front of the main grandstand to mount speaker systems. “But when we surveyed the site for the first time, we discovered that the poles were not in front of the stands as the blueprints indicated, but had been moved to the sides of the stands.” Baker said. “So we had to redesign everything.”
Going back to the drawing board, Baker rethought the problem. “The roof of the grand stand it about 100 feet high, and the stands run from the 10-yard line to the 10-yard line,” he said. “To try to throw the sound from the scoreboard in the end zone would have just been ridiculous because of the length of the area we were going to try to cover. So we decided to install the speakers on special brackets mounted on the roof of the stadium structure with speakers pointed down toward the stands. We had to get the maximum coverage from a minimum of speakers in an outside installation,” Baker said. “We called Full Compass and asked what they recommended for outside installation. After discussing several alternatives, we elected to go with custom waterproofed BAG END CRYSTAL speaker systems.”
The CRYSTAL is a Time-Aligned® full range, high output loudspeaker system that offers high fidelity, high efficiency and high power handling capacity. It is loaded with a high compression driver, a 3-inch copper voice coil driving a custom-designed oval, high-frequency elliptic conical horn and a pair of 12-inch, high-efficiency, low-frequency cone drivers. System coverage angle of a single enclosure is 40 degrees vertical by 55 degrees horizontal.
Baker calculated he needed eight CRYSTAL systems to cover the grandstands effectively. He divided the stands into eight zones then calculated the amount of down tilt and aim attitude to cover each zone. “Once we got our aim and down tilt angle figured out, we had special brackets custom made off-site,” he said. The result? “When we got to the site and installed them everything worked out perfectly, just as it was supposed to on paper,” Baker said with relief. And the speakers performed as advertised.
“The architect, Dennis Jacobs of Coffeyville, wanted a preview before the system was demonstrated for city officials,” Baker said. “I turned it about halfway up and played some Kenny Wayne Shepherd blues and a big smile came across his face …then I cranked it up and he was really amazed.”
