Tampa Bay, FL (July 24, 2024)—Florida’s Amalie Arena broke ground 30 years ago as the Ice Palace. Much as the facility’s name has changed over the years, so have its uses and needs. While best known as the home of the three-time Stanley Cup champions Tampa Bay Lightning NHL team, the arena also hosts events and concerts, and has shows with Incubus, Childish Gambino, Don Omar and Missy Elliott coming up. Regardless of what the attraction is, however, the venue’s Meyer Sound Panther system, installed last year by Solotech, helps ensure visitors have a solid experience inside the 670,000-square-foot facility.
Arena operator Vinik Sports Group (VSG) replaced the pre-existing system, which had been in place for more than 15 years, with a Panther setup based around 96 Panther loudspeakers in two horn variants, supported by 14 Leopard compact linear line array loudspeakers, 20 2100-LFC low-frequency control elements, 19 Ultra-X40 compact loudspeakers. Systems are managed by Galileo Galaxy 816 and 408 Network Platforms and are configured in a hybrid MILAN/Dante network.
“Before the new system was put in place, you’d hear complaints of, ‘I can’t hear,’ or, ‘it’s way too loud,’” says Andrew McIntyre, SVP of Technology & Innovation at VSG. “It was a rough experience. Now, we’ve effectively eliminated all of this. We were able to improve the clarity of all of our messaging.”
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As part of that, the venue has been experimenting with immersive audio. “If you think about who we are as the Lightning, it’s about thunder and lightning,” says McIntyre. “So, the audio system becomes the thunder, and we can use Spacemap Go and spatial audio design to present things like rolling thunder moving around the building.”
John Franzone, SVP of Game Presentation at VSG, adds, “What a new sound system did for us is, it allowed us to elevate the value proposition that your Lightning game ticket has—and by extension, all of the other events that we have here in Amalie Arena that make use of this sound system, suddenly it becomes a very potent, nice little weapon to have when you’re in the event entertainment industry.”
