Inside The All-EAW Loudspeaker Set At Nationals Park
The 2008 Major League Baseball season kicked off in fine style with the grand opening of Nationals Park, the new 41,000-seat ballpark of the Washington, D.C. franchise that features high-octane venue-wide sound reinforcement led by an all-EAW loudspeaker lineup. The system was designed by Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams (WJHW) of Dallas, with Principal Ron Baker serving as lead designer. Tech Inc. of Latham, Maryland handled the fast-track installation, while the Columbia, Maryland office of AVI-SPL supplied custom engineering services.
As they’ve done with frequently with ballpark sound reinforcement projects, WJHW elected to deploy a distributed system, and in this case, it includes more than 450 full-range EAW loudspeakers, with the majority being compact, two-way members of the MK Series.
The MK Series has proven popular in numerous stadium and ballpark projects around the globe due to their quality sonic properties, durability, and compact footprint.
Most of the loudspeakers for Nationals Park are outfitted with either 12-inch or 15-inch woofers, although some MK Series enclosures with 8-inch woofers also proved fortuitous in regions dictating a particularly low profile.
All three major decks comprising the main grandstand that surrounds more than 75 percent of the playing surface receive primary sound reinforcement from sets of three MK Series loudspeakers. Mounted to the underside of the seating decks (and the canopy on the upper deck), these supply long-, medium-, and short-throw output to carefully defined zones.
A sizable number of “dual face” loudspeakers, developed for exactly this type of application by WJHW and the EAW Engineering Department, were also deployed. These special models incorporate two MK Series loudspeakers within a single compact enclosure with a 60-degree splay between the two sets of transducers. (Both dual face and standard MK Series in place at Nationals Park are shown at below.)
Zones of lower level seating running along the edge of the playing field are better reached via high-output EAW MQV Series loudspeakers mounted on the fascia of the upper deck.
More MQV Series loudspeakers are positioned toward the top of the largest stadium scoreboard in the U.S. to deliver coherent, intelligible long-throw (well in excess of 100 feet) coverage to a large seating section in right field.
All loudspeakers for the project were supplied with additional weatherproofing to provide suitable protection from direct exposure to the weather elements. Further, all were painted a custom color by EAW that perfectly matches and blends into the color scheme of the stadium’s primary structural elements.
(Our thanks to Ron Baker at WJHW for this information as well as the photos accompanying this report.)