Community Loudspeakers at Barber Motorsports Park, Birmingham, Alabama

The Barber Motorsports Park, a sprawling 740-acre park, just east of Birmingham, Alabama is home to a musem and 16-turn, 2.38-mile racetrack; the latter has hosted both motorcycle and car racing events ranging from Grand-Am and NASCAR to AMA Superbike and Mustang Club of America. A recent audio upgrade at the venue features Community Professionals R-Series loudspeakers. The new system was designed by Lee Brock, of Birmingham-based Music Alley.

The system is comprised of more than 100 Community R-Series loudspeakers, including a mix of R.25, R.5 and R.5SUB models. "The R-Series is unmatched when it comes to getting the announcers' voices out there so people can understand it," Brock says. "It delivers without having to work very hard." QSC RMX and ISA-Series amplification powers the system, with a Rane RPM-88 providing digital signal processing."

Brock adds that the sound system had to be versatile enough to deliver both power and musicality. "Of course, for a racetrack environment volume is critical," he says. "But their program material also employs quite a bit of music, from singing the National Anthem to a lot of high-energy material, and sound quality was an important consideration."

Another major consideration was durability, says Brock. "We don't get a lot of snow here, but we do get a lot of extreme heat and humidity in the summer, and some heavy winds in the spring. The R-Series loudspeakers survived the tornadoes we had in April, and were still sitting on the wheel fence. Honestly, the system's been in place for a year now and we haven't had to replace a single component."

The track's wide acreage presented one of the project's biggest challenges, says Brock. "We had a number of speaker runs that were going to be well over half a mile, and that just wasn't feasible using copper wire," he explains. "But we were able to use the park's existing fiber connections from Race Control over to four corner stations around the park, and convert it to analog from there. There are a lot of nice hills and turns where the fans can sit on the grass, put out a blanket and have a picnic, and now we can get them good quality sound wherever they are."