A recently renovated school district building in Bristol, VA, includes a 240-seat auditorium for meetings and other events that has been outfitted with a new sound system centered around a
Symetrix SymNet Edge open-architecture, modular-I/O digital signal processor.
The system was designed by Brian McDonald, operating out of the Roanoke office of Lee Hartman & Sons, who notes that he chose SymNet Edge based upon sound quality, ease of integration, user-control options (including ARC-WEB for smartphone-based control), Dante bus networking, and Composer design software.
“I’ve been using Symetrix products for a long time, going all the way back to my years in live sound,” says McDonald. “Symetrix gear has always been very robust, with a ton of headroom. It delivers a clear, clean sound, no matter what the input source. I have beaten the living tar out of Symetrix gear and it never falters.
“In addition, our programmers push for Symetrix because it is so easy to control and because it integrates so well with third party systems, such as AMX or Crestron.”
The auditorium is arranged with nine administrator seats, each with its own microphone, set opposite the 240 public seats. A pair of Crown CTS-600 amplifiers powers a pair of Renkus-Heinz ICX7 small-format column arrays with low-end support provided by a Renkus-Heinz PN112-SUBR subwoofer.
Two Epson 1945W 4200-lumen projectors display visual information. Inputs feed a Kramer VP-438 switcher/scaler for video and a pair of Symetrix SymNet Edge frames for audio.
Each SymNet Edge frame contains four I/O slots, and the new system is populated by six 4-channel analog input cards and two 4-channel analog output cards.
In addition to its robust third party support, the Symetrix product line includes a diversity of user-control options, and McDonald took advantage of them. Symetrix handles control for both the audio and video components.
An Axiomtek touchscreen PC runs Symetrix SymVue customized control for more detailed system adjustments, whereas a Symetrix ARC-2e wall panel remote allows simple adjustments. McDonald also activated Symetrix ARC-WEB, which provides an ARC-style control interface for use on smartphones and other Internet-connected devices.
“This was my first experience using ARC-WEB,” McDonald says. “It was as easy to program as a standard ARC panel, and the best thing is that the client already owns the hardware. It’s a big cost savings. In fact, using Symetrix’ well-thought-out control technology saved them many thousands of dollars, both because Symetrix control hardware is very affordable and because the control programming gets wrapped up with the audio programming.”
The school board asked McDonald to provide a CD recorder to provide a record of events. “I gave them the CD recorder because that’s what they requested,” he explains. “But because the SymNet Edge system uses the Dante bus protocol to network audio, I was also able to give them a more streamlined, robust solution. I installed a Dante virtual sound card on the head IT director’s computer, which can directly tap the Dante audio running on the building’s network.
“It took me literally seconds to configure the whole thing. Now the IT director can monitor and record the meetings from his office. I’ve already heard rumblings about Dante expansion to WAN, which would allow him to do the same thing from home.”