Located near the foothills of California's San Gabriel Mountains, Claremont McKenna College (CMC) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, CA, and home to 1,300 students. The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2025 Best US Colleges rankings rated Claremont McKenna as the 5th-best overall college or university and the best liberal arts college in the nation. When the college’s gym could no longer adequately serve the college’s expanding varsity programs, the school decided to build a new athletic center—Roberts Pavilion with a sound system enhance by LEA Professional amplifiers and dbTechnologies loudspeakers.
[SCN Installation Showcase 2025]
Groundbreaking for Roberts Pavilion took place in Spring 2014, and the building officially opened for recreational use in August 2016. It has become a central hub for CMC and the Claremont–Mudd–Scripps athletic community, offering facilities for varsity sports, fitness, physical education, and campus-wide events. However, the audio in the event arena no longer met the student body’s needs, so the college embarked on a project to improve the intelligibility and audio experience in the arena.
The staff at Roberts Pavilion reached out to Kevin Laymon, an engineer with Western Audio Visual, to upgrade the audio system in the event arena. Laymon promptly included LEA Professional amplifiers in the retrofit plan and contacted Geer Tech, the manufacturer's representative, to help with the installation.
“Basketball courts and other sports facilities are very challenging acoustic environments,” said Laymon. “We wanted to keep the direct court energy as close to the listener as possible, so we developed a distributed loudspeaker design with 23 loudspeaker locations. This required a different approach for amplification as well, so we turned to amplifiers from LEA Professional.
“LEA Professional was the obvious choice for this project,” said Alyssa Ishi, applications engineer at Geer Tech. “Its flexibility to support unique spaces, combined with the power of the Cloud, made all the difference. The students at Claremont College deserve exceptional sound quality, and that’s exactly what they now experience every day.”
Western A/V installed eight Connect Series 704D-ADSP amplifiers and 2 Connect Series 1504D amplifiers to drive 67 dbTechnologies IS Series loudspeakers around the arena, as well as 12 subwoofers. The 4-channel 704D-ADSP provides 700 watts per channel, while the 4-channel 1504D provides 1500 watts per channel. Both IoT-enabled amplifiers are equipped with 96 kHz-capable Dante and AES67 connectivity options, support Hi-Z (70V or 100V) and Lo-Z selectable by channel, and feature Smart Power Bridge technology. In addition, the CS704D-ADSP includes advanced DSP with 96 kHz linear phase FIR crossover filters, acoustically transparent look ahead RMS and peak limiters, and 32-bit floating-point DSP with built-in sample rate converters. .
Besides varsity matchups, the main arena is a versatile, configurable event space ideal for intramural or club competitions, campus convocations, speeches, concerts, and more. “Taming the reverberation in a gym isn’t easy—the high ceilings, hard bleachers, and parquet floors make it challenging for high intelligibility,” said Laymon. “That said, the project turned out great, as was working with Geer Tech and LEA Professional. I wish all my interactions with manufacturers were as enjoyable.”