Completed in September 2014, Rochester Institute of Technologies’ Gene Polisseni
Centre is home to the RIT men’s and women’s hockey teams, though the
multipurpose facility also hosts commencement exercises, concerts, and performing
arts events. Having experienced the limitations of its old arena, the RIT team had
clear ideas about the sound system for their new arena. Even better, they were
able to articulate their ideas to engineering firm and systems integrator Smith +
Andersen. Smith + Andersen, in turn, had an equally clear idea where to turn for a
solution: Fulcrum Acoustic.

“This is primarily a hockey arena that can accommodate up to 4,300,” explains
Smith + Anderson Audiovisual Manager Dustin Su. “Intelligibility is a factor but they
needed a loud system that could create a great fan atmosphere at games, give the
home team the advantage, and intimidate the visiting team. At games, there’s a
Pep Band that probably doesn’t need to be reinforced but we put infrastructure in
place for mic’ing them. We needed a rocking system that could handle all that, as
well as handling other events.”

Working with an EASE model based on the architect’s plans, Fulcrum Acoustic and
Smith + Andersen came up with a distributed speaker system based on 20 Fulcrum
Acoustic Prophile L-series 3-way coaxial loudspeakers to serve the bleachers and
CX-series 2-way coaxial loudspeakers along the concourse. A rigging grid used for
event rigging serves double duty for hanging the speakers. Labgruppen amplifiers
drive the loudspeakers, with DSP handled by BSS London. The system was installed
by AV Solutions of Rochester, NY.

“We considered a design with two centre clusters but the distributed design offered
more flexibility, including the ability to reconfigure the space,” explains Su. “For
hockey games, the school wanted the ability to set the speakers to hit the crowd
area and also cover the rink to pump up the players. A distributed design supported
that. And if the hall is not full, they can activate just part of the hall.”

Another bonus with Fulcrum loudspeakers was their compact size. “Because it’s a
coaxial design, it takes up a relatively small footprint,” Su notes. “During the
planning phase, we knew that video scoreboards would be on either side of the
wall, but their exact location was not known until late in the project. We were
concerned about the sightlines to the scoreboards being obstructed by loudspeakers,
especially from the suites. But the Fulcrum loudspeakers are low-profile enough
that we had no problem with sightlines regardless of where the scoreboards were
placed.”

It turned out to be an excellent project, Su concludes. “The team at Fulcrum
Acoustic and the building architects [BBB Architects of Ottawa] were great to work
with. RIT has a highly respected program, and we worked very closely with their
event productions group and strong broadcasting team. It was great to be part of
the project. And everyone was very happy with the Fulcrum Acoustic system.”