Danley Sound Labs simulates crowd noise for Atlanta Falcons

As the season started, the Atlanta Falcons had a small problem: how to realistically recreate the noisy game day conditions of the Georgia Dome at their training headquarters north of the city in Flowery Branch. The answer, a compact Danley Sound Labs speaker system comprised of SH-50 full-range and TH-115 subwoofer units, proved not only to be a powerful solution, but also, due to its high efficiency, a surprisingly mobile one. And could not have been found much closer to home.

Mike Hedden, Danley Sound Labs, explains that he initially demonstrated the Danley Sound Labs system, which is manufactured in Gainesville, Georgia, after a friend who works at the Falcons’ facility told him that the team was renting equipment to simulate crowd noise during practice. “The old system was cumbersome and time consuming to setup but most importantly wasn’t supplying enough ‘oomph’ to simulate the sound of a crowd of 72,000 people,” relates Hedden.

After setting up two Danley SH-50 full-range cabinets, each paired with a TH-115 subwoofer, Hedden explains, “I told head coach Jim Mora, the beauty of what we brought is that we can leave it in the end zone and you don’t need to take two stacks to the sidelines and run hundreds of feet of cable and shoot the energy across the field. With the old system they could only effectively cover from about the goal line to the 10- or 15-yard. With our system we can cover out to about the 35- or 40-yard line from the end zone, so they have a lot more room to work their drills.”

As Hedden points out, most competing sound systems would most likely require twice as many amplifiers and would therefore be far less mobile and require a lot more power to run. “Part of what makes the Danley products unique is that the efficiency of the loudspeakers is so high that it doesn’t take a lot of power to make them work,” he says. “The Falcons purchased a 5kVA, home-type, portable generator and put the system on a wagon and tow it with a John Deere Gator, so now they’ve got sound wherever it is required on the entire complex including the indoor practice facility.”

Assistant equipment manager for the Falcons, Jimmy Luck commented, “With the help of Mike and Danley Sound Labs we were able to create a portable crowd noise system that really works. The portability of the system allows us to simulate crowd noise anywhere anytime and at a moments notice. The trailer system that we developed has and will continue to save me hours a day of set-up and breakdown.”

Head coach Jim Mora commented, “The new system is awesome! I want to see how we can have this system at the Georgia Dome as our team runs onto the field.”

The Danley SH-50, which offers a power rating of 1,600W with an SPL of 132dB, and the TH-115, which is rated at 2,000W with a maximum SPL of 136dB, are so powerful, says Hedden, that, during the initial demonstration, the system could be heard in the administrative offices at the far end of the building, nearly 600 feet away. “When we fired up the system, Rich McKay, the general manager, got on the phone to the guy underneath him in the weight training room and asked him to turn the sound system down!”

According to Hedden, the system is used for more than just recreating crowd noise. “Because the SH-50s and the TH-115s sound so good, Coach Mora also uses them to play high-energy music to pump the players up. The Falcons use the system to play stuff outdoors every day. And if they have a game coming up at the Dome they use it for crowd noise every time.”