Peavey Breaks Sound Barrier For Blue Angels At U.S. Navy Air Show
Peavey
Posted 2004-05-08
May 5, 2004, MERIDIAN, Miss.---It doesn't take half a million Watts to reach 40,000 people. Peavey demonstrated just that at a recent Naval air show, where only five Peavey power amps and a series of two-way, 12" woofer-outfitted enclosures backed the roaring Blue Angels and the U.S. Navy's finest pilots.
At Wings Over Meridian 2004, held April 17-18 at Naval Air Station Meridian---mere minutes from Peavey International Headquarters---Peavey reinforced its reputation for versatility, innovation and reliability with a sensible, less-is-more approach to event audio production.
Gone were the usual limited-bandwidth metal or plastic horns and the distantly spaced loudspeaker clusters commonly associated with air shows. Also gone were racks upon racks of power amps. Armed with Peavey Impulse® 1012 enclosures and GPS® 3500 power amps, Senior Peavey Clinician and veteran live audio guru Marty McCann assembled an effective, fully distributed audio system that cut through the din of jet engines from World War II-era planes to present-day bombers.
By placing the 31 total loudspeaker enclosures at 50-foot intervals along the crowd line---one power amp for every six speakers---McCann could deliver the audio feed at a consistent volume level. "At air shows you can always hear the system, but it may be too loud in certain spots or it may be hard to understand because of a time lag between the clusters and fill speakers," says Marty Papizan, civilian electrical engineer at Ground Electronics, NAS Meridian. "With the system Peavey came up with, no matter where you're at, you won't get more than a 22 millisecond delay in sound. That's natural reverb."
According to ETC(SW) Michael Jones, Electronics Chief at NAS Meridian, this speaker and power distribution was key because the speaker or horn clusters traditionally used at air shows are both inefficient and unintelligible. Regardless of how much power a system puts out, you still need overhead room so the audio can be discerned---especially at an event such as this, where the system must accommodate both speaking voices and program music. "We set it up to be heard at 90+ dB at 300 feet back, and it does it well. Distributing the speakers was a major factor in pulling this off."
Running 31 loudspeakers in parallel along the 1600-foot perimeter caused a natural voltage drop, though, which McCann trumped with the powerful GPS 3500 amps and a series of line transformers. "We had to put 400 Watt transformers at each speaker to counter the drop in voltage, so every speaker sounded the same and put out the same volume," says Papizan. Each of five GPS 3500 power amplifiers provided a 100 Volt distribution line to power six Impulse 1012 loudspeakers.
In addition, using Impulse two-way loudspeakers resulted in a much broader spectrum of sound reproduction than usually found at air shows. The eight octaves of bandwidth (72 Hz to18 kHz) that Impulse loudspeakers provide is far greater than the typical horns-only air show system, which exhibits only 4 1/3 octaves of bandwidth (500 Hz to 5 kHz). The dramatic increase in bandwidth of the Peavey system resulted in a very natural high fidelity sound that complemented the speech and narration as well as the diverse styles of music the Blue Angels played during the event.
Captain Jeffrey Dickman, Commanding Officer at NAS Meridian, comments, "The Peavey sound system really made the Wings Over Meridian 2004 Air Show a spectacular event. The sound was so crisp and clear. I've been to many air shows and the sound system here was by far the best."
Peavey Electronics Corporation is one of the largest manufacturers of musical instruments and professional sound equipment in the world. Peavey holds more than 130 patents and produces more than 2,000 products, which are distributed throughout the United States and to 136 other countries. To find out more about Pe avey Electronics and its artists, visit www.peavey.com.
