Working from a design penned by Dallas-based Wrightson Johnson Haddon & Williams (WJHW), Pro Sound, Inc. brought the system to life this year just in time for the fall football season. Making up the stadium's main array are eight Meyer Sound SB-1 Sound Beams, eight MSL-6s and seven MSL-4s.

With a distance of 1,000 feet from the closest person served by the array to the most distant, it comes as no surprise when WJHW associate Gary White related that "the hardest thing to deal with as sound designers on this project was the sheer size of the stadium."

In resolving the dilemma, White and the rest of the design team drew upon the success of another WJHW project undertaken at Tampa Bay's Raymond James Stadium. Representing the first large sports facility to ever use self-powered loudspeakers in a main array, Raymond James Stadium is outfitted with a comprehensive Meyer Sound system, the success of which duly inspired the Ohio Stadium project.

According to White, the Meyer SB-1 is the only product he knows of which can project a beam of sound for a distance of 1,000 feet while still providing exceptional sound quality and intelligibility. Unlike the SPL levels produced by more traditional horn-loaded devices, which decrease approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance, the SB-1 parabolic reflector design propagates sound waves that decrease as little as 3 dB SPL per doubling of distance for more than 300 feet, across a five-octave frequency range, all with a consistent and narrow beam width.