The Bank of America Stadium, home of the Carolina Panthers NFL team, has installed 30 steerable CAL column array loudspeakers from Meyer Sound.
The speakers are located in the upper deck area providing audio to 37,000 fans.
“The Panthers’ stadium doesn’t have a continuous lighting catwalk like other NFL stadiums, so there was no place to put the sizeable conventional speakers we would need to cover the upper level without having large clusters up on poles,” said Mark Graham, the system designer and an associate of consultants Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams (WJHW). “Aesthetically, the clusters would have been a hard sell to the architects and stadium management.”
The proposal of the CAL loudspeakers was a turning point in the system design process, according to Cliff Miller, Carolina Panthers audio director who has been with the organisation since 1995. “The CAL loudspeakers were probably the deciding factor in going with a distributed system in that stadium because of their slim profile,” Miller said. “With the CALs, you notice the flags more than the speakers. They look like an integral element of the architecture.”
“The CAL loudspeakers handle everything exceptionally well—not just the announcers, but also music playback, referee mics, and live bands, which the CALs handle easily,” added Miller. “We’re not running them at anywhere near their full potential.”
The Meyer Sound system was provided and installed by Minneapolis-based Parsons Technologies, a division of Parsons Electric. The architecture firm for the upgrade was Wagner Murray Architects.
