Like many of the National Football League's older stadiums, EverBank Field in Jacksonville, Fla., is continually making upgrades to its facilities to keep up with the standards of America's most popular league. Recently, the 84,000-seat stadium, home to the Jacksonville Jaguars, underwent renovations which included bringing their sound capabilities to the front of the line in the NFL.
EverBank Field’s management company SMG hired Christopher “Topper” Sowden, principal consultant of Sowden and Associates in Fort Worth, Texas, to design a new audio system that will connect fans better to the game and improve the overall experience.
When the stadium was built in 1995, the original sound system was a simple cluster of speakers around the scoreboard. From the beginning, Jaguars Chief Financial Officer Bill Prescott said, the sound quality varied widely in different parts of the stadium and often was affected by the wind.
“It was never the quality that we wanted for the fan experience,” Prescott said. “We've explored for years whether we could get a distributed system. But because of where technology was, it wasn't possible until two or three years ago.”
Prescott worked with the city, which owns the stadium, on a plan to implement a distributed system. A group including Prescott as well as representatives from SMG and the city visited other stadiums to scout their sound systems. They hoped they could create one with the impact of recently-opened MetLife Stadium in E. Rutherford, N.J.
“Everyone walked away from MetLife saying their four video boards enhance the experience, but their quality of sound is just so much better than ours,” Prescott said. “That set us on the path where we said, we do need to upgrade the video board, but the sound has to come first.”
EverBank chose a distributed line array system where Variable Line Array loudspeakers are mounted to lighting structures behind the stands. These line arrays are aimed at low-grazing angles of incidence into the seating space from behind the spectators.
“EverBank Field is a large, open and relatively shallow oval,” Sowden said. “We agreed that a distributed line array approach would provide a noticeable enhancement to the fans’ audio experience in the bowl.”
There was a slight issue with the lower bowl, however. EverBank Field does not have an overhanging upper deck. So the sound coming from upper deck speakers would go over the top of the last 10 rows of the 200 level. The venue had to add supplemental speakers to ensure the last 10 rows would have the same quality as the rest of the stadium.
The system, which was installed by locally owned Florida Sound Engineering Company, is part of a bigger project to help EverBank Field catch up with newer stadiums like MetLife. It also aims at keeping the club competitive in a smaller market with a struggling team. The Jaguars won just two of 16 games last season and have made the playoffs only three times since 2000.
“We can't control what happens on the football field,” Prescott said. “But we can control what happens at the stadium in terms of sound, video, entertainment, halftime show and how our guest services act. We have to hit on those to keep fans coming back.”
Last season, official NFL attendance figures suggest the Jaguars did keep people coming back despite their 2-14 record. Attendance numbers provided by ESPN.com listed the Jaguars as 17th in the NFL in percentage of capacity filled, right behind a MetLife occupant, the New York Giants.
More improvements to EverBank Field are expected within the next two years. The final touches still have to be put on the sound system. Eight of the originally designed arrays have been installed with the remaining four scheduled for completion in 2013. The team is also expected to put in a new video board by 2014.
Interviewed for this story: Bill Prescott, (904) 633-6569; Topper Sowden, (817) 346-0406