Haverford, PA – The Haverford School, a K through 12 preparatory boy’s school with an enrollment of about 970, has been in its current location since 1903. Among its alumni, it boasts artist Maxfield Parish, as well as astronaut Pete Conrad, the third man to walk the surface of the moon. The school’s athletic complex houses a pool, a wresting pavilion, a squash pavilion and three gyms.

Having previously provided audio equipment on a rental basis for school plays and events, Clear Sound of Yeadon, PA was contacted by Steve Stephenson, the Managing Director of the Centennial Hall Fine and Performing Arts at Haverford to upgrade the sound in one of the gyms as well as the wresting pavilion. The double court basketball gym, which also serves the school for other events such as commencement exercises, and their annual silent auction, measures 108′ by 175′ with a ceiling height that according to Chris Dietze, President of Clear Sound, reaches 57′ at places. The previous system, as Deitze notes, “did a great job of exciting the reverberant field.”

With a goal of achieving high intelligibility throughout the gym Dietze devised a solution consisting of an overhead grid of 36 Community R.5COAX99 loudspeakers. Each loudspeaker is suspended from a custom built Unistrut arm mounted to bracing beams, which span the court. “They’re all trimmed to about 24′, and it’s a very rigid structure because we expect them to be pelted with balls and athletic equipment,” says Dietze. Clear Sound’s Installation Manager, Chris Hughes, oversaw the installation, which took about a week to complete.

A Biamp Nexia system provides all necessary system processing including, mixing, routing, equalization, and delay control and QSC amps provide the power. “Since the configuration of the room changes depending on the event, we’ve designed the system so that selected speaker zones could be shut off depending on where they chose to put their portable stage,” said Dietze.

Dietze concluded, “I think that given the reverb time, the intelligibility is exceptional. The fidelity is good, the coverage is extremely even, and I’m very happy with it. It sounds almost exactly like the prediction plots showed it would sound.”