When Kim Leonard of Professional Audio Designs was called into solve problems with the sound system in Shorewood High School’s theater, the challenge was clear.
As Kim describes it, “Shorewood has a very active and progressive high school theater program where they put on up to five or six productions a year, so the sound quality had to be really good.”
The design/build project was actually an upgrade from a system that had been put in 15 years earlier that was ground-stacked side of the proscenium.
According to Leonard, the system took up too much space and didn’t provide the required coverage “because it’s a typical older theater with a deep balcony and the sound wasn’t getting to the back of the balcony and under balcony.
“Budget is always an issue with high schools, but Shorewood was willing to make the commitment required to reduce the system footprint along with expanding the coverage throughout the venue.
“So they made the decision to increase their budget and gave us the go-ahead after we impressed the Theater Director with a demo of Martin Audio’s OmniLine array.”
“For the install, we Ease-modeled the venue and added left and right mains of 8×4 boxes of on each side of the proscenium in addition to the existing center cluster.
“As it turns out,” adds Kim, “they are very happy with their new system. Even with the smaller speakers; quality, quantity and coverage were not compromised.”
“It worked out really nicely because the OmniLines have so much physical output for their small size everybody thinks the speakers are just a small left/right fill and the cluster is doing the majority of the work, but in fact it’s the other way around. They deliver more even coverage from the front to back fill.
“The theater group now gets tons of gain before feedback in a theater that can run up to 40 wireless systems at a time on a show by show basis. The speakers just sound amazing.”
