Client Overview and Project Requirements
North Raleigh Christian Academy operates a competitive athletics program in Raleigh, NC, with a football stadium that hosts games, ceremonies, and community events across the fall season. The stadium’s original sound system had reached the end of its service life, and the school engaged CIAVL to replace it ahead of the 2026 season — a ground-up design and installation delivered entirely by CIAVL’s in-house team.
The stadium was the lead space in a broader athletic sound modernization at NRCA. It carried the most demanding acoustic requirements on campus and set the standard for the work that followed.
The Challenge
The stadium’s existing loudspeaker array delivered uneven coverage between the home and visitor stands. Reaching the visitor bleachers meant driving the home-side system well beyond comfortable levels — punishing for the home crowd while still leaving the far side thin and hard to understand.
Two site constraints ruled out a conventional fix:
- No center-field mounting position. The press box roof — the natural place to anchor a stadium array — was unavailable, with the coaches’ box sitting directly above it.
- No infrastructure on the visitor side. The visitor stands had no speaker mounts, no conduit, and no power. Covering that side the traditional way would have required trenching cable and power under the running track — disruptive, expensive civil work outside the scope of a sound-system upgrade.
The design had to deliver even, intelligible coverage across both sides of the stadium while working entirely from the home side.
Acoustic Modeling and Coverage Validation
Before selecting a single mounting position, CIAVL modeled the full loudspeaker layout in Danley Prism 3D at site-specific conditions — 77°F ambient temperature and 50% relative humidity, with air-absorption loss included so the prediction reflected real outdoor propagation across the length of the field.
The model placed all nine loudspeakers on the home side and validated coverage against sixteen measurement points distributed across the home and visitor seating zones. Each position and aim angle was confirmed in the model before installation, so the array’s ability to reach the visitor bleachers from the home side was engineered and verified up front rather than adjusted by ear on site.
The Solution
CIAVL specified a Danley-based system engineered for the stadium’s geometry, with matched Danley amplification, a new digital mixing surface, and a new wireless microphone system. A single Danley OS62 long-throw loudspeaker, mounted at 35’, carries clean, intelligible audio across the field to the visitor stands. Six Danley OS15CX coaxial point-source loudspeakers at 30’ handle the home bleachers and supporting coverage along the home-side line, and a pair of weather-rated Danley THMini15 subwoofers flank the main array for low-frequency reinforcement. Two Danley DNA 10K4 Pro four-channel amplifiers drive the system, matched to the loudspeakers by the same manufacturer, and Danley’s own pole-mount rigging carries the new hardware.
At the announcer station, an Allen & Heath Qu-5 32-channel digital mixer gives operators a modern control surface, paired with a Shure MX418D gooseneck microphone for announcements and a Shure SLXD24D dual handheld wireless system for on-field use. A Shure UA874US active directional antenna extends wireless range and RF reliability across the stadium. All rack electronics were consolidated into a single equipment rack and repositioned to reclaim usable workspace in the announcer station.
Placing all nine loudspeakers on the home side eliminated any need for cable, conduit, or trenching on the visitor side — removing the project’s largest cost and disruption risk before it ever reached the field.
100% In-House Execution
CIAVL self-performed every element of the project — acoustic design, engineering, installation, system programming, commissioning, and end-user training. No subcontracted labor touched any part of the AV scope. For NRCA, that meant a single point of accountability from the first site walk through game-day handover, and one team to call for support after the season starts.
Outcome
North Raleigh Christian Academy’s football stadium now runs on a modern, acoustically modeled Danley loudspeaker system engineered to deliver consistent, intelligible sound from the front row to the back row on both sides of the field — without overdriving the home stands to reach the visitors. By covering the entire stadium from the home side, CIAVL avoided the trenching and civil work a conventional design would have demanded, and delivered the system commissioned and ready before the first home game of the fall season.
