Brigham Young University

Bringing a Community together Through the Latest in Auditorium Broadcast Technology Integration

The college that prays together, stays together. That simple aphorism is part of what is behind the huge, new event center at the core of Brigham Young University’s (BYU) multi-purpose satellite campus in Rexburg, Idaho. Officially known as the BYU Idaho Center and Hyrum Manwaring Student Center, the three-year, ground-up construction project includes a 15,000-seat auditorium. The auditorium’s size was based on the maximum number of students and faculty the campus can accommodate. It was the desire of BYU leadership to provide a single space where all could participate in traditional Tuesday devotional services, which required a broadcast technology integration within the auditorium to accomplish.

Diversified played a key role throughout the project and was contracted during the architectural process in a design assist role to the general contractor. Once the base building design and cable pathways were established, Diversified waited for construction to catch up before proceeding to the detailed system design. Diversified’s Greg Doyle notes, “With two NAB’s between the start of the project and the commencement of installation, we thought it best to wait and see where the technology went to insure the system was not outdated from the start.”

To fill the enormous volume of the auditorium, the sound system features a combined point-source and distributed design using Yamaha’s NEXO systems components; three main L-C-R clusters hang in front of the 105-wide X 70-foot-deep stage. Each array houses 22 GEO D10 speakers in a cluster, configured so that two are side firing and one is firing downward, a design to address the auditorium’s fan shaped design.

The building’s broadcast center is fitted with an Evertz broadcast routing switcher, HD-Video 250 x 400 (576 2-frame), 192 x 192 channels of AES audio and 16 x 16 MADI streams. There are 20 camera positions located throughout the theater that feed two production control rooms, as well as three offline editing suits, two audio sweetening rooms and a master control room.