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Making It Work, And Work Well,
On A Budget
By Keith Clark
Editor, Install Sound
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The employee meeting and café
space at Gentex.
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Gentex, a leading supplier of automotive devices based in
Zeeland, MI, asked Group
Signal to design and install an audio system in a new
employee meeting and cafeteria space adjacent to one of the
company’s larger production plants. It’s an open,
pleasant space, measuring approximately 100 ft. long by 50
ft. wide, with ceilings stretching to a height of 15 ft. and
two of the four walls made up of floor-to-ceiling windows.
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The system would be used for background music and also carry the
building-wide paging feed, but most importantly, it would provide
reinforced sound for assemblies and meetings led by various company
officials. Complicating the picture was the need for several system
configurations, with the client wanting to place a platform at any
one of four locations in the room.
“The volume of the room and its many hard, reflective surfaces
dictated that we use a distributed loudspeaker configuration to
place sound directly on the listeners as much as possible,”
explains Gary Zandstra, who heads Group Signal’s A/V division.
“This is the best way of insuring intelligibility (clarity)
for everyone, no matter where they are located, but it also requires
dividing the loudspeakers into independent zones when the system
must have multiple configurations, which was the case here.”
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One of the lines of Community CPL
distributed loudspeakers.
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Dual rows of compact Community
CPL Series two-way loudspeakers provide coverage throughout
the room. They were ordered in white to blend in with the
ceiling, producing very accurate and controlled output.
Zandstra considered several alternatives before settling
on a new digital signal processor, the Shure
P4800, as the heart of the system. The unit is programmed
with several different system presets, each tailored by Group
Signal to provide optimum performance in a given configuration.
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