When your high school is on the edge of the largest mountain range in North America, you tend to think big, and that’s exactly what Fountain-Fort Carson High School did with their new Trojan Arena. The 4,800-seat venue—even larger than similar arenas at nearby Colorado College, CSU Pueblo, and Northern Colorado University—opened late last year and can accommodate four simultaneous full-court basketball games. Encircled by a two-lane indoor running track on the upper level, the floor and bowl are also regularly used for volleyball, wrestling matches, assemblies, graduations, and other events.
“It’s an amazing facility, even more so when you realize that this is a high school arena, not a college or professional venue,” says Ron Howard, Principal Consultant of Colorado Springs-based Eleven Tech Group, which did the arena’s AV design and AV consulting. He says the consultancy worked closely with both the architect, CRP Architects, also in Colorado Springs, and Brown Note Productions, the Thornton-based AV systems integrator, to achieve highly intelligible and impactful sound as well as flexible coverage that would assure great audio for seating both in the stands and on the floor.
This was accomplished via a total of 14 hangs of L-Acoustics A Series enclosures, as well as KS21i subwoofers, all furnished in white to seamlessly blend in with the facility’s catwalks and ceiling architecture. The four main arrays each comprise a hang of two KS21i subs and two A10i Focus and two A10i Wide enclosures. Four corner arrays are made up of two A10i each mounted horizontally. The narrow ends of the arena are covered by four hangs of one KS21i over two A10i Wide at each end of the venue. In addition, there are two court-fill hangs of three A10i Focus and one A10i Wide that are used when floor seating is needed. Nine LA4X amplified controllers power the entire system, and a single LA2Xi is used to drive four X8 used as stage-lip fills for the portable event stage, as needed.
“It’s a fairly conventional system design; combined with the acoustical treatment the architect specified for the arena ceiling, it creates a lot of power and impact, but with excellent speech intelligibility and high energy for games, plus great low end for music,” observes Matt Bauer, Senior Integration Project Manager at Brown Note Productions. “Excellent voice intelligibility was a requirement for the system and it meets it very well, but does so without taking away from impact for music. It’s a very tight sound for a large and reflective arena space, which is typically hard to accomplish, but the Soundvision design built around A10i, along with truly premium-level support from L-Acoustics, really made it happen.”
Howard says he became aware of Ai Series after a discussion with a colleague who had used the system for a similar project in Hawaii. “We discussed the system’s capabilities, and it became clear that this is what would help us realize the owner’s and architect’s vision for the venue’s sound,” he says. “But what really sold us was the engineering and design support that L-Acoustics was able to provide, including the use of their excellent Soundvision software. All that was key to success.”
Howard points out that A Series’ compact form factor was critical in making the project work. He notes that the Colorado High School Activities Association specifies that sound and other system components cannot hang less than 25 feet above the floor in sports facilities. “A Series is compact enough to give us big sound in a small cabinet that’s also the perfect fit for the height restrictions of the space,” he says. “A10i was everything we could have asked for and more.”
For more information on Fountain-Fort Carson High School and its new Trojan Arena, visit https://ffchs.ffc8.org. Eleven Tech Group and Brown Note Productions can be found online at www.eleventechgroup.com and www.brownnote.com, respectively.
