Buccaneers audio engineer Randi Crooks at Raymond James Stadium’s new Allen & Heath ML4000 mixing console
The Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., recently installed an Allen & Heath ML4000 24-input VCA mixing console. The stadium is home to the National Football League’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the University of South Florida football team.
Randi Crooks of Magnum Audio Group, Inc., audio engineer for the Buccaneers for the last 15 years as well as a consulting engineer with the Tampa Sports Authority, which administers the stadium, specified the Allen & Heath console. “The console that was previously in there was deficient,” he explains.
Located in the sound booth high above the end zone, the Allen & Heath ML4000 distributes entertainment programming and announcements throughout the stadium. “There are multiple zones—concourse, club, press box—which are all coming off of auxes,” Crooks says. “We have the referee system for the bowl, and we also have BucVision, our video animation department.”
BucVision—operated by over 30 technicians—comprises two 24-foot by 92-foot video-boards, with each screen offering High-Definition TV
play-action views from three different angles at either end of the field, plus network television highlights before and after Bucs games from up to six NFL games simultaneously.
The new Allen & Heath console provides high-fidelity audio to match the high-definition video. “We send BucVision program material down the line to the console—a lot of music, and a lot of commercials. We also do production, such as the ‘National Anthem’. And we do have some national acts that will come in and do a half-time show,” says
Crooks.
The statium has a Meyer Sound powered speaker system “that wants to see +26 dB before the processor works the way it was designed to
Work,” explains Crooks. “It was only seeing +21, so it was going into clip before any limiting or anything was involved. But the ML4000 console produces +27dB outputs,” he reports.
For more information on Allen & Heath consoles, visit www.allen-heath.com.
