Nashville, Tennessee - Ryerson University's Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens, in Toronto, Ontario Canada, now features a newly upgraded sound system that includes One Systems direct weather, high intelligibility loudspeakers. Located in downtown Toronto, Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens is the former Maple Leaf Gardens Arena, home of the Toronto Maple Leafs from 1931 to 1999. 

Toronto's Mulvey & Banani International, Inc. performed the site analysis and created the system's design, and Westbury National Show Systems of Toronto installed the speakers and other equipment. 

The arena in the NHL-sized hockey rink seats 2,539 and is the new home of the Ryerson Rams hockey team as well as the recently-renamed Toronto Shooting Stars of the Canadian Lacross League. The entire Toronto community also uses this historic facility and it features a large skating rink, a multi-purpose court, studios, multi-purpose meeting rooms and a state-of-the-art fitness center. 

Ryerson University began doing a facility-wide renovation and repurposing of the original Maple Leaf Gardens space and became aware that a sound system upgrade was desperately needed. They tapped Mulvey & Banani International Inc. for the design work. The facility's large-sized arena space and reverberant acoustics dictated a distributed loudspeaker arrangement to ensure even coverage of the spectator's space as well as the playing surface. 

One Systems' performance, quality, value and reasonable size made the choice easy for Mulvey & Banani. "The performance of this new sound system met all the design's intent. We were surprised at the sound pressure level that the 112IM loudspeakers deliver. Speech intelligibility is very good and the system delivers much higher acoustic level and gain-before-feedback," says Devy Breda, Senio AV Systems Designer at Mulvey & Banani. 

The 112IM speakers had to be flown from existing narrow catwalks, therefore the size and weight of them were an issue and a factor. The compactness of the 112IMs were a winning factor for this particular setup, and on top of that they had no problem meeting the required volume," says Breda. 

The fact that hanging speakers from the catwalk was necessary, absolutely affected the loudspeaker cluster's placement due to the restricted size and fly points. "Our design stipulated that the loudspeakers and clusters were to be oriented horizontally with their horns rotated. The sound contractor fabricated custom-made fly brackets for each loudspeaker cluster to comply with the design's intent," explains Breda. 

The clustering of speakers allowed sound energy to be directed appropriately in such a reverberant space. Furthermore, the distributed topology permitted preset "zoning" of sound whenever required for various special events. 

"Our overall impression gathered from conversations with Ryerson University's faculty, the student body and other stakeholders is that there is great overall satisfaction with the performance of this new sound system," explains Breda.