The Pelham Civic Complex Now Has "Quick Change" Capability Thanks to Bose

The Pelham Civic Complex, a 5,000-seat multi-purpose arena in Pelham, Alabama, wears many hats. Home to the University of Alabama's club hockey team, the Pelham Youth Hockey League, and the Birmingham area youth travel hockey program, the Civic Complex features two NHL regulation-size ice skating rinks with a holding capacity of 500 skaters, as well as a skating school. The Complex can also be called on to host anything from a high school graduation ceremony to a birthday bash. The venue needed a sound system that could adapt to any of these missions and more, and they found it in the Bose F1 Model 812 Passive Flexible Array Loudspeaker, which was the central part of a system that was installed earlier this year by leading regional AV system integrators focus4media. The system includes six F1 passive loudspeakers in an exploded-cluster array around the center of the arena.

"The Pelham Civic Complex asked us to design and install a sound system that would not only increase sound quality but also provide ease of operation within the facility," says Ross Brown, director of projects and engineering at focus4media's Alabama office. "After the initial consult, our design team went to work utilizing Bose Modeler design software and the F1 passive speaker. The new system gave the Pelham Civic Complex's staff the flexibility to configure their space as needed without compromising any audio quality." Brown says the F1 system offers the wide vertical coverage pattern capability this project required as well as multiple room dispersion settings, to accommodate everything from a skating rink to a multi-purpose arena setup, and to do so in a very tight install time frame. Thanks to the F1's unique design; the flexible array system allows users to control its vertical coverage pattern by simply pushing or pulling the flexible speaker array into position to create "Straight," "C", "J", or "Reverse-J" coverage patterns, tailoring the loudspeaker's vertical coverage to a variety of environments. "It's an incredible and unique design," says Brown. "The F1 let us provide them with a sound system that can cover the arena in any configuration, from a full hockey rink to a stage setup at one end, while also providing the correct coverage patterns for those configurations, all powered by a single Bose PowerMatch PM8500N networked amplifier."

Since the Bose F1 system has been installed, the range of events the facility can handle has expanded considerably, says Danny Tate, the facility administrator at the Pelham Civic Complex. He cites home games for the ACHA-league hockey teams of two University of Alabama System campuses as well as cheerleading competitions and a circus. "We've been loving the Bose sound system, and so have all of the event producers who have come here since it was put in," he says. Tate says the system achieved its goals of expanding the audio flexibility of the arena, as it offers both excellent speech articulation and broadband music reproduction, and is easy to operate by our staff. Brown says that operational accessibility is a key feature of the Bose system. "We created presets in the ControlSpace DSP that let users choose a variety configurations," he explains. "It provides a quick change capability that lets the venue serve a variety of users and program material."