ABSTRACT
Stadiums and outdoor venues present designers with a set of challenges which are not usually encountered in interior spaces. The leading challenge is the immense distance over which sound of an appreciable level must be projected. This is followed by the fact that the sound is not propagating in a stable medium-i.e., outdoors the air temperature and relative humidity are erratic variables and the air is hardly ever still. Lastly, in addition to the normal 6 dB loss for doubling of distance from a point source in a free field, there exists an additional attenuation from atmospheric absorption whose value is a function of frequency and depends on both temperature and relative humidity. These challenges will be addressed in turn.
