AES PNW November 20, 1999

Safeco Field Audio System Tour Report

JPG photos of this meeting

SAFECO Field Audio System Tour Report November 20, 1999

Written by Rick Smargiassi, AES PNW Officer and Mark Pearson, Head of the Sound Department at SAFECO Field

The world renown retired audio goddess and section chairman, Aurika Hays, introduced Rick Smargiassi, our evening's event coordinator. Rick Smargiassi worked at SAFECO Field as an installation technician during the final equipment installation and wiring for CCI Systems, the sound contractor. Mr. Smargiassi is the president of Integrated Light and Sound Company, Inc., our section's webmaster, among many other audio related things that he is doing.

Mr. Smargiassi opened the session with "Welcome to the region's largest audio system tour." He noted that our section had toured three other CCI Systems installations in 1996, 1997, and 1998. He proclaimed "It is now 1999 and time to tour the SAFECO Field Audio System."

Mr. Pearson is the Head of the Sound Department for the Seattle Mariners at SAFECO Field. He was the project manager and project designer working for CCI. He was hired by the Mariners and started working for them in June of 1999.

Mr. Pearson gave an overview of the audio system. CCI was awarded the contract by the Public Facilities District in October of 1997. The ballpark holds 47,000 people. JBL speakers are used through out, Control 28's in particular. Other sound elements include a Soundcraft K2 mixing console, BSS Sound Web, QSC CX amplifiers, and Peavey Media Matrix to route signals to places such as the Diamond Club and Club Lounges.

Mr. Pearson next introduced Ron Simonson, Vice President of CCI Systems. Mr. Simonson informed us that CCI designed and installed systems for churches and ballparks. He noted the similarity in the two were the need for good clarity for music and good clarity for speech.

CCI was required to submit their proposal to the Public Facilities District. CCI put a team together consisting of Pelton Marsh Kinsella (PMK), out of Dallas, Texas, Sequoyah Electric, and CCI. Five firms submitted proposals, four were asked to make presentations to a selection committee. Sequoyah Electric installed the conduit infrastructure and speakers through out the ballpark as a subcontractor to CCI Systems.

PMK was instrumental in the development of the auralization where the stadium was built and modelled in EASE for demonstration to the selection committee. PMK was selected to be apart of the CCI team because of their design efforts on Bankone Ballpark and the new Miller Park, which is currently under construction. PMK also developed presentations on different acoustical strategies for the ballpark. Mr. Simonson explained the three design approaches that the CCI team presented to the PFD committee.

Centerfield speaker cluster
The location of the speakers for this design would have been a large mass of speakers mounted where the scoreboard is right now. This method was not selected for reasons that the patrons in the Center Field bleachers would have had undesirably high sound pressure levels and the late delayed reflections which would have be worse than the Kingdome.
Low Density System
This method was using speakers mounted to the sun canopy above the upper deck seats to cover the upper deck and lower deck seats from one point. Included in this design were a compilation of under deck speakers spaced approximately 28' apart.
High Density System - Which was selected by the selection committee
This method was similar to the Low Density System except the design included speakers mounted to the upper deck facia steel to cover the lower deck seats. The design also used a higher density speaker coverage for the under deck seating areas where there is a pair (front firing and rear firing) of speakers every 14 to 16 feet apart. This design includes subwoofers. The High Density systems was designed in stereo for better depth and dimension. In the event of an emergency, the system is also used as the bowl evacuation system. Since the system is stereo, there is an added redundancy factor since adjacent speakers are powered from separate amplifiers.

The original contract was $2 million, which included conduit, isolated ground, uninterruptible power supplies and emergency power wiring. Since the project was on a fast track timetable, 40% of the project was in change orders bringing the total project to $2.7 million.

Mr. Pearson came back and talked about some of the technical aspects. They use a computer program called Game Ops Commander for their stereo audio playback. Digital signal processing is accomplished via the BSS Sound Web and routed to the three-amplifier rack rooms using QSC's RAVE system.

At this point in the presentation, Mr. Pearson introduced Jeff Sanderson. Mr. Sanderson was instrumental in designing and selling the new sound system to the Mariners when he worked for CCI. Mr. Sanderson now works at Northshore Marketing and is the manufacturer's rep for JBL who manufactured speakers now installed at SAFECO Field. Mr. Sanderson did a short presentation on the BSS Sound Web 24 bit, 8 in, 8 out, digital signal processor.

Mr. Pearson came back, yet again, and talked about QSControl Ethernet 10 Base T. Scott Klarchik, of QSC, programmed the control end of the QSC system. The system has an event log that reports shorts, opens, protects, and clips. QSC is working on a system where such errors will be reported on Mr. Pearson's alphanumeric pager.

After the presentations, the attendees went on a tour of the audio systems. The four tour guides were Mark Pearson, Ron Simonson, Jeff Sanderson, and Ken Scott. Mr. Scott is the Head of the Video Department at SAFECO Field. We toured the three amplifier rooms on suite level, a luxury suite, the Front-of-House Mix position and equipment rack room. The tour ended on the upper decks of the seating bowl.

Mr. Pearson did a sound demonstration of the upper deck speakers. Mr. Simonson hosted more questions for a listening audience of 175. Here are some of the answers:

They currently have no different audio system preset for when the moveable is roof open and when the roof is closed. It was determined that whether the roof was extended or retracted, that different system tunings were not needed.
System tuning was accomplished with the use of TEF, Smaart Alignment, pink noise, CD and ears when no audience was in the ballpark.
The sound system is the primary evacuation system. The entire sound system is on emergency generators. The DSP's are on UPS's for the time-lapse for the power up of the generators.
The target maximum SPL was 100 SPL dBA. Mr. Pearson says he keeps it around 85 dBA with 90 dBA peaks.
The hardest to manage is being able to turn off empty seating areas with only a few patrons in a section. They like to turn off these areas to reduce reverberation, but even if there is one patron in a section, that section cannot be turned off.

AES thanks Rick Smargiassi and Mark Pearson for coordinating this tour of the region's largest audio system at SAFECO Field.

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