The Whitley Conference center, located at The Oblate School of Theology, located in San Antonio, TX, boasts an auditorium, lecture halls and classroom space in addition to a host of other amenities.
The new 24,000 square foot facility, which opened in 2012, provides the school with a place to accommodate different kinds of gatherings while allowing more comfortable and efficient seats for continuing education events and large assemblies.
Overland Partners, an architecture firm in San Antonio, teamed up with San Antonio office of system design firm Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon and Williams (WJHW), to coordinate the design of the building with AV and technology requirements.
San Antonio Sound & Light, also of San Antonio, provided the final sound reinforcement system design and installation of multiple Tannoy based systems that fulfill the schools needs for the multi-use venue.
“It was a team effort in every way imaginable,” explain Mark Stevens, president of San Antonio Sound & Light. “WJHW did a preliminary overview of the project and defined the criteria of the AV system which we then used to generate the final proposal.”
The auditorium is a multi-purpose space that when used in its entirety can seat up to 1,000 people. The large room features a vaulted ceiling with dropped down wood panels adding a unique architectural aesthetic to the room.
The auditorium also has the ability to be broken down into three separate spaces for smaller group environments. As such the sound reinforcement system needed to accommodate a variety of uses. Stevens installed a distributed system that consists of twenty Tannoy VX 8 loudspeakers.
“Because of the way the wooden panels are dropped down from the ceiling with plenty of space between each of them, we were able to position the VX 8s in a way that made them effective but also almost invisible,” explains Stevens. “The center system has eight evenly distributed loudspeakers firing straight down at the seating area—the left and right sides are similar with six VX 8s in each section.”
The compact VX 8 features an 8-inch Dual Concentric full-range driver with a peak output of 119 dB. Tightly controlled 90 degrees conical dispersion allows for optimum coverage of the seating area.
Before the dropped-down wood panels were installed, San Antonio Sound & Light mounted the VX 8s to the ceiling utilizing the supplied yoke loudspeaker mounts. The auditorium system is operated by a Crestron Control System tied into a nearby Media/Translation room. The Media/Translation room is also home to a BSS London processor that provides any additional processing required by each zone.
In addition to sound reinforcement, San Antonio Sound & Light installed three projection systems in the main auditorium that enjoy the convenience of motorized screens that can be utilized as needed – each of which are also controlled by the Crestron system.
The conference center also features three lecture halls and three classrooms – all which needed their own AV systems. San Antonio Sound & Light equipped each of the three lecture halls with eight Tannoy CVS 6 ceiling loudspeakers. The three classrooms were also equipped with four CVS 6 units distributed evenly throughout the rooms.
The compact, small footprint CVS 6 is a 6-inch full bandwidth blind mount model, specifically designed for applications requiring the combination of excellent sonic quality for music and speech reinforcement, exceptional reliability and most critically – affordability.
When the lecture and class rooms are being used for lecture purposes, pan tilt zoom cameras connected to Crestron HD video recorders provide a feed to the Media/Translation room for translation purposes.
“All in all it was an extremely successful project,” concludes Stevens. “The school is very pleased with the end result – we provided sonically superior systems that were easy to use and flexible enough for any purpose they could conceive of. In short, it was exactly what they were looking for.”