Sound For Racing
Although recording studios are my favorite environment to work in, I have done a lot of work in other venues too. In the past several years I”ve spent a lot of time in sports facilities working on large scale sound systems. I”ve been lucky to experience some very exciting events and see a lot of history in some well known places. One such place is the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
My good friend and mentor Steven Durr is now in charge of the public address system at IMS (Indianapolis Motor Speedway or “The Brickyard”). The track is currently host to three major events each year…the Indianapolis 500 in May, the Brickyard 400 in July, and this year is the MotoGP in September. Steve and another friend and colleage of mine, Dave Dusick, typically have me come up and do some maintenence on the sound system at the track the week prior to each event. So a few weeks ago I went up to work a few days before the Sprint Cup race.
In addition to the PA system at the Brickyard, Dave is also overseeing some improvements at ORP (O”Reilly Raceway Park) where the Nascar Nationwide series and Craftsman Truck series race during the same weekend as the Sprint Cup race. I spent most of my week at ORP as the system at IMS was in fairly good shape.
The system at the ORP dragstrip needed some serious attention. The design was typical of most dragstrips. It’’s a very basic front end feeding an amp rack which drives a number of Cobraflex horns in a constant-voltage (70v) system. We decided to address just the front end and the amp rack on this trip and leave the horns for another trip.
The entire system has been changed, patched, and re-patched many times over the years. Our approach was to just tear it all out and put in all-new equipment. It is sometimes far easier to just start over than it is to try and figure out what other people were trying to do. Systems like these in speedways around the country are usually run and maintained by non-audio people and can end up being beyond repair in some cases.
Upstairs in the announce booth, I took out the toy mixer and cassette player and put in a user-friendly (read: can”t mess it up) mixer, CD player, AM/FM tuner, and added a wireless mic.
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Then I attacked the amp rack.
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We put in a new rack with shiny new QSC amplifiers. We left the existing speaker cable, but I re-dressed it in the amp rack and in the fuse box. The fuse box looks kind of funny, but it actually is a good idea for a system like this. Each of the eight or 10 speaker lines goes through a 10A 240V fast-blow fuse which protects both the horns and the amplifiers depending on where the trouble originates.
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Dave also wanted the ability to turn on and off each speaker line so that the PA could be heard on not in certain zones. The simplest way to do this so that no additional processing is used and each amplifier’’s level controls are not messed with is to just put a switch on each amp input. Since a single mono signal is fed to all the amp channels in parallel, it was easy to make a single panel with on/off toggle switches for each amp channel.
One difference when working on systems like these compared to studio systems…these systems are used mainly for public address with dependability and intelligibility being the goals rather then accurate reproduction of music. You must really approach the design and operation of a racetrack public address system differently than you do a recording studio. While they both deal with audio, that’’s about where the similarities end.
Now that the dragstrip system was ready to go, it was time to head over to IMS.
The massive sound system at this massive facility has also been changed and patched around over the years, but with the help of Steve, Dave, Tom Moores, myself, and a few others, it is now well documented and running quite smoothly. There are areas such as the media center where some improvements and upgrades need to be made, but for the most part the system is fine.
While I was there we added some volume controls in the amp racks to control the volume in some areas around the infield and added a few horns to increase coverage.
How many sound guys does it take…
