The new 185,000 square-foot Saint Peter High School, just north of Mankato, Minnesota, will be completed in time for the 2017/2018 school year and features an 800-seat auditorium, several music rooms, a three-court gymnasium, and plenty of classroom, meeting, and office space.
Multi-state regional A/V design firm Peterson AV Consulting designed Saint Peter’s audio system, relying on Ashly Audio’s NX- and SRA-Series amplifiers to deliver audio to practically every corner of the building.
“The school district trusted me to choose equipment that would serve them well, day-in and day- out, without trouble or complication,” explains David Peterson, president of Peterson AV Consulting. “I’ve experimented with numerous audio equipment manufacturers over the years, and I’m loyal to those who have proven products that reliably meet my clients’ needs. Ashly is one of those companies.
“Ashly’s amplifiers are affordably priced, which is critical because I’m charged with spending my clients’ money. Having fancy plastic, fancy lights, or big advertising budgets aren’t important to my clients and so they aren’t important to me. Instead, Ashly focuses on performance and reliability, and their products have earned my trust.” Mankato-based Video Services handled the system installation at Saint Peter High School.
The system uses QSC AC-Series loudspeakers for paging to nearly every room and Fulcrum Acoustics CX and AH-Series loudspeakers for the gymnasium, the auditorium, the music rooms, and other places where louder volume and fidelity are critical. They rely on a sizable collection of twenty-five Ashly amplifiers. Two and four-channel multi-mode models that deliver 400-watts per channel (nX4004 and nX4002), 800-watt models nX8002 and four-channel models that deliver 3,000-watts per channel at 2 Ohms (the model nX3.04).
For smaller zones, Peterson chose the four-channel 150W Ashly 1U models nX1504 and SRA-4150. “I love designing with Ashly amplifiers because they make so many eight, four and two-channel amplifiers in a huge range of wattages,” Peterson says. “Since most of my work involves a huge number of zones spread over a large area, Ashly is my choice to maximize rack density.”
The system uses Symetrix Prism/Radius processing and Dante connectivity to link everything together, most obviously the system-wide paging functionality. In addition, Peterson gave the school a recording studio. A collection of microphones in one of the rehearsal rooms connect to a media hub on the opposite side of the building, where a student engineer can talk to the studio with a talk-back mic. Dante sends signals back and forth.
“Ultimately, it’s a pretty straight-forward system for a rather complicated set of requirements,” Peterson says. “It’s a meat and potatoes story and an example of how much more bang a school or institution can get for its buck given the state of technology these days.”
