Springfield’s Park Central Square is steeped in history. Wild Bill Hickok’s famous July
1865 gunfight with gambler Davis Tutt occurred on this square-one of the few
recorded instances in the Old West of a one-on-one pistol fast-draw duel in a public
place. Legendary U.S. Route 66 is said to have begun here in 1926. By then, the Fox
Theatre-then the Electric Theatre-had been operating on Park Central Square for ten
years. Except for an extended renovation after back-to-back fires in 1946, the Fox
continued operating until 1982. It was a church from 1985 to 2014, when the History
Museum on the Square took over the building and began renovations.

While it was important to preserve the building’s historic features, the History Museum
staff also wanted to take advantage of modern video and audio technology. To that
end, they tapped Springfield AV engineering and automation firm Sensory Integration
Audio Visual, which designed and installed a new video-enabled marquee and
equipped it with a Renkus-Heinz IC Live audio system.

“The marquee project was unusual because, in order to use tax credits for historic
buildings, it had to meet requirements for look and feel,” notes 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 40 or 50 dB 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-foot throw.”

The museum’s owner, of course, wanted high-quality music and clearly 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 wasn’t much space for a high-
quality loudspeaker.

For Smith, there was only one solution. “We chose the Renkus-Heinz IC Live for its
steerable beams, sound quality, and ability to fit into the small area that we had to
the right of the LED screen,” he asserts. “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
hear music and speech throughout the entire footprint intelligibly.”

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. Most important, the Renkus-Heinz IC
Live system is a great product that met and exceeded every expectation.”