MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE: Middle Tennessee State University’s athletic teams compete in Division I of Conference USA, and its Blue Raiders athletes do most of their indoor training in the Charles M. Murphy Athletic Center, which houses a basketball arena, multiple gymnasiums, training rooms, and a well-appointed weight room. Local A/V integration firm Southeastern Sound Inc. recently upgraded the weight room sound system using Ashly Audio processing and amplification, which greatly improves the system’s impact and simplifies the ease with which student athletes can operate it.
“The system was originally installed with excellent loudspeakers,” explained Brian Cook, senior audio designer at Southeastern Sound. “However, the electronics in support of those loudspeakers were of poor quality and difficult for students to operate. We went in and replaced the existing processing and amplification with an Ashly 3.6SP 3×6 Protea™ loudspeaker processor and three Ashly KLR-Series amplifiers. In addition, we added two JBL subwoofers to fill out the low-end impact of the system. The student athletes want a lot of boom with the high impact music that is played during workouts.
The Ashly 3.6SP provides comprehensive equalization, crossovers, compression, and signal alignment. Given the locations of the loudspeakers relative to where most of the weight room’s activities take place, Rick Redfern, senior technician, delayed certain zones to align arrival times and thus improve fidelity. Based on their proven reliability and incredible value per watt, he installed two Ashly KLR-2000 dual-channel 1,000W amplifiers to power the existing EAW loudspeakers and one Ashly KLR-3200 dual-channel 1,600W amplifier to power the new JBL subwoofers.
“Swapping out the existing electronics for Ashly processing and amplification made a BIG difference in the audio quality and impact in MTSU’s athletic weight room,” said Cook. “The improvement wasn’t subtle. The school officials who initiated the change are very pleased with the result. It’s everything they had hoped for. In addition, we gave the students a simple jack that allows them to plug in their smartphones or iPods as a music source. It’s really simple, and the sound quality they get is now consistently excellent.”
ABOUT ASHLY AUDIO
Ashly Audio Inc. is recognized as a world leader in the design and manufacturing of high quality & high performance signal processing equipment and power amplification for use in the commercial sound contracting and professional audio markets. The 40-year old company is headquartered in Webster, New York U.S.A.
