RCF Provides The New Sound Of Fremont Street

Fremont Street, like any place in Las Vegas, is a sight to behold. Located in the city’s historic downtown district, the glittery five-block pedestrian mall attracts 19 million people annually to its casinos, shops, museums, restaurants, two-story zipline emerging out of the world’s biggest slot machine, and three live music stages. The star attraction, however, is the 1,500' Viva Vision video ceiling canopy—the largest display of its kind in the world—that awes visitors with 12.5 million synchronized LED lamps that output dazzling light shows accompanied by 550,000 watts of sound.

When the Fremont Street production team needed to replace its aging audio, it turned to RCF to design a system that would offer state of the art sound and rugged durability in the harsh desert environment. “We had been using RCF on the live concert stages for almost three years,” says Fremont Street production manager Joe Pizzo, “and with its performance and reliability, we knew it was a system we could rely on.”

 

Fremont Street’s three stages are outfitted with RCF PAs.

The System

Fremont Street’s three performance stages are outfitted with RCF PAs, with RCF HDL20-A systems on two of the live music stages and a TTL55-A large-format line array on the main stage.

To cover the length of the Viva Vision display, RCF’s engineers in Italy collaborated with the Fremont Street team to design 50 clusters, each comprising six HDL20-A dual 10'' two-way active line array modules and one SUB8005-AS active 21'' subwoofer. The clusters were then custom-mounted on steel frames and flown beneath the canopy.

Pizzo says the cluster design was developed a year prior to installation. “After a lot of thought and a lot of listening, the constant curvature array was the winner,” he says. “When RCF was brought in to demo, they were given the basics of the design and asked to complete Ease Models. These proved to provide great coverage.”

Clusters were custom mounted on steel frames.

Tuning to Perfection

The teams set splay angles to cover the length of the attraction while still minimizing sonic bleed into adjacent casinos and retail storefronts. Given the street’s challenging acoustic spaces with unusual reflective surfaces, the system was mostly tuned by ear. “To put it simply, the entire street was walked and every inch listened to,” Pizzo says. “Any anomalous areas were tuned specifically for that area. There were quite a few areas that required an ‘ear.’ To be honest, every cluster including angles was tuned by ear.” He adds that he used an analyzer for the final overall check.

A few months in, the new system is exceeding expectations. Pizzo says comparing the new sound with the old sound is like comparing apples to oranges. “The old system was nearly 20 years old and only approximately 50 percent of it was functioning,” he says. “The difference now is crystal clear sound with stunning lows spread evenly throughout the entire street. The dB levels we can now achieve are in line with modern line array/concert levels. RCF has been the perfect partner in providing FSE exactly what was needed to do the job right. We are as thrilled with it as we were on Day One.”