Ralph Wilson Stadium
Buffalo, New York
Home of the Buffalo Bills

Seat Count: 75,300
Project Type: Renovation
Original Construction: 1973
Renovation Complete: 1999 Season
Electrical Engineer: Buffalo Engineering
A/V Installation: SPLIS
AD Scope: Sound Reinforcement,
Clubs/Suites A/V, In-House Cable TV
Systems, Room Acoustics

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The State of New York made a commitment to the Buffalo Bills by agreeing to make a significant investment in the National Football League's team and its facilities. Improvements to the stadium included the addition of upper deck restroom towers, expanded clubs, contoured armchair seats to the lower bowl, 76 new dugout suites and luxury sideline club seats. A vital part of remodeling the stadium was upgrading the outdated sound system. AD was hired to provide acoustics consulting, the sound system design, MATV and audio/video design for private suites, clubs and concourses.

The success of the Buffalo design was in rethinking speaker coverage in a stadium. The great challenge was that they couldn’t afford a distributed system, which would have been the easiest solution. We predicted that the other traditional approach-an end-zone cluster-would not work because of the plan to construct party suites. The big problem with an end-zone cluster approach in this stadium would be very strong late arriving reflections off the building glass. The problem already existed with the suites that were in place, and since the renovation doubled the amount of party suites, it was clear that the problem would only get worse.

In reviewing the architect's design for the new construction, we realized that the new restroom elevator towers provided a speaker mounting position that would be appropriate for sideline clusters. We developed a crossfire hybrid solution we developed so that the sideline clusters and flagpole speakers provide coverage to the near seating bowl and long firing elements would provide coverage across the field.