In much of the world, soccer fandom is the permanent weather. In the United States it arrives in waves, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup was the biggest wave yet: 48 teams, 104 matches, 39 days, and a final in July that Spain took from Argentina with an extra-time winner. Houston was one of the host cities and it spent the summer at full voice. But this city’s soccer does not pack up when a tournament does. It runs every week, in front of four different sets of supporters, at Shell Energy Stadium, where since earlier this year it has been carried by a new L-Acoustics A Series loudspeaker system designed and installed by LD Systems, a Clair Global brand.
Opened in 2012 and designed by Populous, the 20,656-seat ground was the first soccer-specific stadium in Major League Soccer built in a city’s downtown district. Four teams now share it: Houston Dynamo FC, twice MLS Cup champion and US Open Cup winner in 2018 and 2023; the Houston Dash of the National Women’s Soccer League, who took the 2020 NWSL Challenge Cup; the Texas Southern University Tigers college football team; and the Houston Gamblers of the United Football League.
The building has been improving since the day it opened, starting with LEED Silver certification and, in January 2023, a decarbonization package bundled into the Shell Energy naming-rights deal: venue-wide LED lighting, rooftop solar, renewable electricity, and sub-metering that shows staff where the 4.2 million kilowatt hours a year actually go. The club wants to halve its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2026 against a 2018 baseline. Scope 2 is purchased electricity, which means the PA counts alongside the floodlights.
Higher Energy, Better Coverage, and a Good Neighbor Downtown
The system it replaced dated to the 2012 opening and had been on the club’s list for years. The new system arrived inside a wider investment round; in October 2025, majority owner Ted Segal committed to a full overhaul of the stadium’s sound system, part of more than 30 million dollars put into the building since 2021. “They’ve wanted to do a new PA for quite a while,” says Matt Rhodes, LD Systems Sales Engineer. “There had been updates to dasher boards and video walls and things like that, but now audio was high on the list.”
The brief was ambitious from the first conversation. The general manager wanted higher energy and better coverage than the outgoing vocal-reinforcement system could give him. “He basically told me, ‘I want to make sure that we get a noise complaint from the police from my neighbors,’” Rhodes recalls. “He was joking, of course, but it underscored their desire to bring greater impact to the fan experience.”
Behind the joke was a real design target. Shell Energy Stadium sits in downtown Houston with East Downtown on its doorstep, so the brief was never simply more level, it was more level exactly where the fans are. That put intelligibility in the stands and control everywhere else on the same list—on the pitch, where the officials’ calls have to cut through, and past the walls, where the venue is a neighbor.
LD Systems had two more boxes to tick, and both worked in the venue’s favor. The existing cabling infrastructure could carry the new system, which kept the budget down and kept new copper out of an occupied building. And management wanted the coverage without any major structural modification, which is precisely the kind of problem A Series is shaped for.
Two Ends of the Bowl That A15i Had to Reach
“The east and west bowl seats were fairly easy because they have these big overhangs, but getting good coverage on the north and south sides from a design standpoint was definitely a challenge,” Rhodes says. Neither end offers an overhang to fly from, the corner throws are long, and one end holds a standing supporters’ and band section that is loud in its own right and sits at an angle no single well-aimed array serves cleanly. “That’s always been a huge gap for them,” he says. Above the north seats, the main video display, roughly 34 feet high by 73 feet wide, takes much of the space an array would otherwise want.
Using L-Acoustics Soundvision modeling software, LD Systems mounted enclosures to the scoreboard structure itself and fired additional A Series arrays from the southeast and southwest corners back toward it, closing the gap without adding steel. “That was a specific request from management, that we provide solid coverage there without adding any type of major structure modification,” Rhodes says. “And the A Series was exactly the right choice for that in terms of size, power, and coverage.”
Anthony DiDonato, LD Systems Project Engineer, notes that A Series propagates plenty of upper-frequency energy while keeping it tightly directed. Each A15i uses Panflex for horizontal directivity control, while vertical coverage is fixed by the enclosure: 30 degrees for A15i Wide, 10 degrees for A15i Focus. “The vertical directionality of A Series is excellent, and Soundvision showed us exactly what was going to happen, and it just worked,” he says. “That let us keep the sound highly intelligible for the fans, but also keep it off the field where it can become a distraction for players and others on the sidelines. That’s crucial for hearing the officials’ calls in the PA system.”
Ninety-Six A15i and 16 KS21i on Twelve Amplified Controllers
L-Acoustics A Series won the job on the pairing that decides most of them, performance against price. “We could achieve everything they wanted with A Series, getting the performance that we were looking for at a price they were happy with,” Rhodes says.
Main bowl coverage on the east and west sides of the stadium comes from 16 hangs of four A15i Wide, interspersed with eight pairs of down-firing KS21i subwoofers. The north seating area adds four smaller arrays of one A15i Focus over one A15i Wide above and around the video display, while the south end sports three arrays of four A15i Wide flown from a canopy that extends out over the central seats. The four corner seating areas are covered by arrays of two A15i Focus over one A15i Wide. In total, the system comprises 84 A15i Wide, 12 A15i Focus, and 16 KS21i, collectively driven by ten LA12X and two LA4X amplified controllers.
Using only a dozen amplified controllers to cover the entire bowl, added to the reused cabling and an untouched roof structure, gives the stadium a full-scale PA upgrade that sits lightly on the energy budget it is working to shrink.
Fans Heard It Before They Knew About It
The venue often runs DJs before, during, and after matches, and the flown KS21i give that material both low-end impact and tonality. “The previous system was more of a vocal-reinforcement type of setup, and now it’s much more music-friendly,” DiDonato says.
The clearest verdict came from people nobody had told. “We heard a ton of unsolicited comments about how much better the sound is from people that had no idea that there even was a new sound system in there. Fans, who are not technical people, said to us, ‘Wow, it sounds so much better this season,’” Rhodes relates. “To get that kind of feedback was really cool. It just makes us feel like, okay, this system truly has made a great, positive impact on the fan experience.”
For more information on Shell Energy Stadium, visit www.houstondynamofc.com. More information on LD Systems can be found at www.ldsystems.com.
Please visit L-Acoustics at www.l-acoustics.com.
