Fulcrum Acoustic WR Series loudspeakers have been chosen as part of the distributed sound system intended to centre the sound at the Katy Independent School District’s $72 million Legacy Stadium.
Two years in the making, the stadium serves more than 77,000 students from the suburban Houston district’s eight high schools. The 12,000-seat venue hosts American Football, lacrosse and football, as well as marching band competitions, concerts and community events.
The main challenges for the new system were to ensure precise directional control to keep sound from overlapping with the existing 9,800-seat Rhodes Stadium next door on the school’s sports campus. The other was for extremely durable weather-resistant loudspeakers to combat the Texas heat.
“To keep sound within the bowl, I designed a distributed system with 18 weatherised Fulcrum GX1295-WR loudspeakers pole mounted at the top of the seating areas, and a half dozen more mounted through portals in the canopy above seating on one side of the field,” explained Ryan Knox, senior consultant at acoustics consultants Idibri. “Nine Fulcrum AH96-WR coaxial horns were also pole mounted above the stands, with six more integrated in the press box canopy. The AH96s’ low frequency extension to below 80Hz helped to simplify the system’s design by eliminating the need for separate subwoofers.”
Knox specified Fulcrum Acoustic’s durable, weather-resistant WR Series loudspeakers to withstand the challenging Texas environment. In an early test, Fulcrum’s WR speakers weathered their first storm when all Legacy Stadium’s Week 1 high school football games were postponed due to Hurricane Harvey.