Community Pumps Up UMass Minutemen

After almost a decade of near-legendary bad sound, the
University of Massachusetts has upgraded the sound system at Warren McGuirk
Alumni Stadium, its 17,000-seat football stadium in Amherst, MA. Fans of the
UMass Minutemen, 2007 CAA Champs, have been treated to an audio-system upgrade
that brings new excitement to their games.
ATC Audio
in Springfield, MA, has installed a pair of Community R6-51 full-range
multi-driver vertical-array loudspeakers, along with two RSH-462 exponential
focused-array horn systems. The two loudspeakers and two horns have replaced
the stadium’s previous system of more than 10 paging horns, delivering vastly
improved intelligibility for announcements and better musical fidelity as well.
The biamped system is powered by Crown CST-Series amplification, with DSP
handled by dbx processing.
“The old
horns had always been a bit of a problem in terms of intelligibility,” says ATC
president Tony Caliento. “And after 10 years of Massachusetts winters, they had
certainly seen better days, and were pretty much beyond repair.”
Caliento
says the stadium administrators were a bit skeptical when they saw 10 horns
being replaced by only two horns and two speakers, but it didn’t take long to
convince them. “We knew the Community horns were powerful enough that two would
do the trick, but adding the R6 speakers also gave them a really nice music-playback
system,” he notes. “When we fired the system up and put on some music, the team
was totally psyched up within about a minute. And it was the first game anyone
could remember where people in the stands weren’t asking each other what the
announcer had just said.”