A gymnasium resides directly above, but any potentially detrimental noise is negated by acoustic isolation treatment between the gym floor and the room’s ceiling.
“Acoustically, the room is fairly well behaved, all things considered,” notes Rick Robinson, president of Sound Reinforcements. “The ceiling panels help considerably, and the floor is usually shielded by a good-sized audience at times when the sound system needs to provide higher levels.”
As the church’s lead system representative, Eldridge laid out clear criteria regarding the functionality of the new system.
“Signal flow, equipment choices and location, and the like, were all Acoustic Dimensions issues,” Eldridge explains. “My primary focus came from the user’s point of view. Would the system do what we needed it to do in a relatively simple, straightforward manner?
“Our system operators are good at what they do, but they are not full-time engineers, so the system needed to be as simple and intuitive to work with as possible.
“And, we also needed an automatic mode where we could provide quality audio for things like meetings where an operator couldn’t be present,” he continues. “Both Acoustic Dimensions and Sound Reinforcements were very sensitive to these issues, and together we came up with a proper direction.”
Appropriate Direction
Elwell has been designing systems for well over a decade, and he specializes in pulling together the myriad jumble of details that exist at the beginning of any systems project, forming them into the appropriate direction.
Surveying the needs at Highland Park Presbyterian, he envisioned dual systems – one of higher level and capability to meet full-blown contemporary needs, and another one of a more automatic, rudimentary nature to meet the needs of smaller functions.
This dictated a digital signal processing front end, headed by a simple system interface.
“DSP is a fairly proven technology at this point,” he says. “There are several good options available now is this regard. My concern wasn’t so much the option selected, but its proper implementation in getting the church what it needed in terms of the best possible solution for their specific needs.”
Sound Reinforcements, Inc. chose to implement a Symetrix Audio SymNet digital signal processing and routing technology to head the full-range house sound system, in addition to serving the stage monitors.
This SymNet model offers 8 input by 8 output modular architecture (stand-alone 8 input and 8-output models are also available and can be integrated via SymLink network interface), and the hardware is configured by the SymNet Designer software package.
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With 32-bit floating point processing, SymNet offers all processing functions needed for higher-level systems, including crossover, equalization, gates, delays, compressors and even AGC levelers and voice processors. Routing can be set up for mono, stereo and left-center-right systems.
“This was our first experience with SymNet, and it is a highly positive one,” Robinson says. “We found it extremely easy in terms of initial setup and programming, and it’s also efficient – only about 60 percent of its total processing power is needed for this system at the current time, and that includes processing sets for the stage monitors. As a result, future expansion of the system is readily available.”
SymNet is housed in a mezzanine-level equipment room, rack-mounted with the system’s QSC CX Series power amplifiers. All processing parameters were optimized by Acoustic Dimensions and Sound Reinforcements, Inc. during the system tuning process and are password protected so unauthorized users can’t change them.
And, this gear received a new, dedicated electrical circuit with a VastCon custom power control system for sequential on/off.