Springfield’s Park Central Square was the scene of Wild Bill Hickok’s July 1865 gunfight with gambler Davis Tutt and is reckoned to have been the beginning of US Route 66 in 1926, by which time the Fox Theater (then the Electric Theater) had been operating there for ten years. Apart from a closure for renovation after back-to-back fires in 1946, the Fox operated until 1982, was a church from 1985 to 2014, and then the History Museum on the Square took over…

While eager to preserve the building’s historic features, the History Museum wanted to adopt modern video and audio technology and called on local A/V specialist Sensory Integration Audio Visual to designed and installed a new video-enabled marquee.

‘The marquee project was unusual because in order to use tax credits for historic buildings, it had to meet requirements for look and feel,’ says Sensory Integration owner, Darrin Smith. ‘One of the unique pieces is a large LED screen that can mock the original plastic-letter-based marquee but can display video as well. The building has a large sidewalk and gathering area in front, as it did originally, and the History Museum staff wanted to show historic videos, like the Route 66 videos that were played in the past, in order to draw people to the square and the museum.’

Smith’s team faced challenges that required technology as special as the project. ‘Since the square is a community gathering place, the City of Springfield has an elevator-type music system that goes on during the day and plays announcements and such,’ he observes. ‘So the city asked that when we’re projecting sound onto the patio area, we keep it very tight. We couldn’t have more than 40dB or 50dB SPL past the sidewalk. But when we’re supplying sound for events on the square, which is roughly 600 by 600 feet, we’re allowed to cover the entire width down below the marquee and then all the way across the entire diagonal of the square, a little more than an 800-ft throw.’

The museum’s owner wanted high-quality music and intelligible speech: ‘We also needed an automation system that allowed the owner to quickly change between the local, very steered-down beam to the multiple-beam application all the way across the square,’ adds Smith. ‘Furthermore, the LED marquee had to be the exact size of the original plastic marquee. The marquee is very thin, and the LED screen only had a few inches on either side.’

That didn’t allow much accommodation for a high-quality loudspeaker: ‘We chose Renkus-Heinz IC Live for its steerable beams, sound quality, and ability to fit into the small area that we had to the rightof the LED screen,’ Smith reports. ‘No other technology allowed us to fit a system into that box and create the beams and the presets we needed. We steered a single beam very tightly right in front of the marquee and to the street edge, and once you’ve crossed the street, the sound dies out. That’s Preset 1. Preset 2 fills the entire square with multiple beams.’

It helped that Renkus-Heinz was willing to send someone in to demo the IC Live for the client. ‘We were able to test the loudspeaker before the marquee ever went up, and then the product became part of the engineering process for the sign company, the LED company, and us,’ recounts Smith. ‘On the first day, the owner was very worried about the sound, so he walked around while we played music. He was very impressed that he could hear the sound clearly as he walked the edges of the square and then walked straight up the middle of the diagonal of the square. He was able to intelligibly hear music and speech throughout the entire footprint.’

Designing and installing a system for a specialised application like the Fox Theater is a lot easier when you have the right partners, Smith concludes: ‘Having Renkus-Heinz as a partner allowed us to create a great solution for our client. Their engineers and the local rep helped us through the entire process, from the sale to the commissioning, which is rare in our industry.’