In April, the Miami Marlins inaugurated a new season of baseball in brand-new Marlins Park, located in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami.
The stadium’s distributed sound reinforcement system, designed by Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams (WJHW) of Dallas, incorporates 517 EAW MK, QX and MQX Series loudspeakers. The system was installed by Minneapolis-based systems integrator Parsons Electric.
Marlins Park has a retractable roof, but in order to best take advantage of the sun for its natural-grass field, the stadium had to be angled in such a way that the grass get as much exposure to the sun as possible between games.
As a result, rather than the usual half-dozen or so section templates in the seating areas for which a basic configuration of loudspeakers would make up a repeatable pattern, this system’s design required over 30 individual section drawings, with nearly every one of the upper-deck sections being unique. Thus, loudspeaker placement and aiming was different for virtually every location on the upper deck.
The loudspeakers are grouped into 23 categories, in some cases with multiple units required to deliver coverage to a single area.
In addition, the stadium’s asymmetrical design meant that focal points often needed different throw-length speakers set at different distances and patterns. For instance, the area around home plate uses the EAW MQX8343-MS-WP long-throw enclosure from one side, but is matched on the baseline sides and outfield porch by a shorter-throw QX564-WP unit.
“The system design was very complex, but the EAW speakers were exactly what we needed to make it work,” says Tim Habedank, systems specialist at Parsons Electric. “On opening day, the sound was clear and highly intelligible, even over the noise of a capacity crowd.”
Habedank adds that while the roof is likely to be closed for most events at the stadium, the long reverb time when it is closed, particularly in the lower frequencies, will remain under complete control, thanks to the precise aiming pattern that the EAW speakers are capable of.
“We were able to achieve very tight pattern control across the spectrum,” Habedank says. “Yet at the same time the longest-throw speakers maintain the coherence of the sound for distances of between 200 and 300 feet. It’s really remarkable performance and the sound of the stadium shows it.”