360 to Stadiums: Designing Audio Systems for Modern Touring

360 to Stadiums: Designing Systems for Modern Touring

For a long time, designing touring audio systems was relatively predictable. You built a system based on a general venue type—or even a few specific venues of the same type. You optimized it for speed and consistency, and repeated that deployment for the foreseeable future until the tour ended. If you were doing hockey arenas, you generally stayed in hockey arenas. If you were doing sheds, you stayed in sheds. The PA didn’t necessarily need to reinvent itself every day; it just needed to go up fast, sound good, and fit in the truck efficiently.

Modern touring seems to be departing further and further from this every day.

On a recent run, our routing jumped between 360 arenas, amphitheaters, and outdoor stadiums ranging from soccer fields to baseball parks, all on the same tour leg. Suddenly, the job shifted from, “How do we make this PA sound great?” to, “How do we design a system flexible enough to do all of this without rebuilding every day?”

Asking these questions shifts how we think about system design and its infrastructure.

Instead of designing for a single optimal PA deployment, I started designing around a system that could be modular. The goal was to create a PA system that behaved more like a set of LEGO blocks than a fixed-format touring rig. I needed a design that could scale down, break apart, and reconfigure, while maintaining consistent workflow, deployment plans, and reliable sonic coverage.

This consistency becomes the real advantage. Saving time, labor, and confusion leads to smoother, more predictable results, and ultimately saves money and effort across the board.

Traditionally, most tours are designed around the “average” room. If the majority of your routing consists of 270-degree arena deployments, then naturally the system revolves around that base design. Anything outside of that becomes a one-off adaptation. In this case, I decided to work backwards. I asked myself, “what is the maximum amount of coverage I’ll ever need?” The answer was 360 degrees. On most days, I needed to make it all the way around the room from top to bottom. 

To accomplish this, our main PA consisted of eight main hangs and four flown sub hangs organized into four independent 90-degree sections. If you imagine the system as a circle, each quarter of the circle functioned as its own modular building block consisting of a main hang, “side” hang, and associated flown sub system. Each quadrant also had its own amp barge and associated infrastructure of looms. Every set of looms was designed with strategic break points so we could remove up to 100 feet of cable at any time without changing the overall system configuration. Each cable package lived in preloaded truss sections, so you only needed to assemble the truss bridge each day, run the loom tails, and up you go.

That approach immediately gave us options.

In amphitheaters, we could deploy only half the rig while still maintaining full venue coverage and consistency. In arenas in the round, all four quadrants became active to create full 360-degree coverage. Then, in stadium mode, the design really started to prove its value.

The most interesting challenge came when transitioning into stadium deployments.

In those environments, the system effectively transformed from a 360-degree arena rig into a 180-degree stadium system. Two quadrants of the PA became the primary main system, while the remaining two transitioned into delay hangs positioned roughly 200 feet downfield behind FOH. 

Instead of carrying an entirely separate delay package, we repurposed the same infrastructure already traveling with the show.

That was the entire philosophy behind the design: every piece of the system needed to serve multiple purposes. 

The delay system allowed us to maintain PA coverage all the way into the rear seating areas. But using our touring rig without any massive rebuilds ensured the crew wasn’t suddenly dealing with unfamiliar infrastructure or supplemental systems that only appeared once every few weeks.

Everything remained part of the same ecosystem.

That consistency matters more than people sometimes realize. When teams are loading in under tight timelines, familiarity becomes one of the most valuable tools.

Loudspeakers are only half the equation. The infrastructure behind the system ultimately determines whether a modular concept succeeds or fails in practice.

In our case, the system was built around four dedicated PA barges. Each barge housed seven LA-RAK IIs and powered approximately 25 percent of the overall flown PA. Since each section functioned independently, we could move pieces around freely depending on the venue geometry without redesigning the entire signal flow every day.

The slightly unconventional part of the design was the network topology.

Instead of relying on a more traditional ring network topology, we chose a star network with two central points: one connection rack located at front of house and another located under the stage.

That decision solved several problems simultaneously.

In a 360-degree arena deployment, all four barges could connect through the FOH “connection rack”, while the ground subs and front fills connected through the “onstage connection rack”. These two racks are connected by a standard FOH drive snake. By creating a central point at FOH, we dramatically shortened cable runs and simplified cable paths. In stadium mode, however, the system naturally split into two zones. The main PA connected through the “onstage connection rack”, while the delay system connected through the FOH rack.

The infrastructure essentially mirrored the physical deployment of the PA itself.

The result was significant savings in cable length, deployment time, and troubleshooting complexity. It also reduced the amount of reconfiguration required from day to day.

One of the most overlooked parts of system design is the human side of deployment. One of the first conversations I had while designing this system centered around taking care of our techs and avoiding placing too much strain on any one person. We have a total of 4 dedicated PA fly techs who each flew a main, a “side” and a sub hang. This also meant that each person was responsible for their quadrant and had an area of the show to take ownership over. 

It’s easy to focus entirely on drawings, SPL targets, and prediction software while forgetting that we all still have to load in the show every morning. A design that looks perfect on paper can quickly become a nightmare if it creates unnecessary complexity for the people deploying it.

From the beginning, this system was designed collaboratively between departments. As the system engineer, I worked closely with production management, rigging, lighting, and video to determine what would make everyone’s day easier while still achieving the necessary sonic goals.

Those conversations included topics such as sightlines, amplifier locations, cable management, delay placement, weight distribution, and more. 

The modular approach simplified many of those conversations because the building blocks remained relatively constant regardless of venue type. Instead of reinventing the deployment every day, the crew simply rearranges familiar pieces into different configurations.

That reduced stress and sped up both load-ins and load-outs. It also minimized the chaos that often appears when supplemental vendor systems are added into a touring package for only a handful of dates.

There’s also a strong financial argument for designing systems this way. Touring has become increasingly expensive. Trucking costs continue to rise, labor is tighter than ever, and productions are under constant pressure to maximize efficiency without sacrificing scale.

A modular system helps solve several of those problems simultaneously. Instead of carrying specialty PA that only gets used for a few stadium dates, we built a single ecosystem capable of adapting to every stop on the tour. That meant one set of looms, one set of amps, and one PA package.

None of this works without time and information to prepare. The biggest factor that allowed this system to succeed was receiving routing and the creative show design early enough to design around it intentionally. Once you understand the venues, the schedule, the visual elements you need to avoid, and the scale of the transitions throughout the tour, you can start building infrastructure that supports those realities. 

We’re no longer living in a world where every show on a run looks identical. Post-pandemic touring has pushed productions toward wider venue variation and more aggressive scheduling. As a result, system design now has to account for adaptability from the very beginning.

In many ways, modularity has become less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Ultimately, the best touring systems today aren’t necessarily the ones optimized for a single perfect room. They’re the systems designed to come apart, reconfigure quickly, and go back together again without sacrificing consistency.

Sometimes the smartest design choice isn’t building the biggest PA possible. It’s building one that knows how to change shape.