In professional rodeo, staking a claim as the best of the best means taking the ring at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, held each December at the 19,000 seat Thomas & Mack Center on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Culminating each year’s rodeo season, the Wrangler NFR is the premier championship rodeo event in the United States, with 21 events and performances over 17 days. Participants compete for the largest rodeo prize money in the world, and winners can walk away with not only a coveted golden belt buckle, but also in excess of two hundred thousand dollars. With plenty of dirt, sweat, and noise, the high stakes are about all the event shares with the glitz of the gaming tables a few miles down the road.
Keeping the excitement pumped up at the NFR for both announcing and live entertainment was an Electro-Voice sound system. The system was based on four center-hung line arrays, each at 90 degrees to the next to cover the arena’s 360-degree seating area. Each array was made up of three XLC215 dual 15-inch subwoofer line-array elements over eight XLC127DVX compact full-range elements. The system was powered by 32 Electro-Voice TG7 amplifiers, using FIR filters to optimize the audio feed to the characteristics of the loudspeaker components.
Overall system processing and routing was handled by a pair of Electro-Voice NetMax N8000-1500 controllers. The amplifiers and controllers were configured and operated via a wireless tablet using Electro-Voice’s IRIS-Net software.