The Lewis & Clark Center, a 400,000-plus-square-foot facility at the United States Army Command Fort Leavenworth, has been outfitted with an upgraded system centered on an Ashly Audio digiMIX18 + Dante-3018 module.
Fort Leavenworth is home of the Command and General Staff College (CGSC), which has the mission of preparing military members for command, and the system upgrade, implemented by Mission Electronics (Lenexa, KS), serves the center’s three-story foyer where ceremonies for graduating students are held.
“The challenge was that the foyer was never explicitly designed to host ceremonies,” explains Aaron Alt, federal channel manager at Mission Electronics. “The different types of surfaces, the big open space in the foyer, the multiple angles; it all caused the audio to come off really poorly during the presentations.”
The integration includes 31 loudspeakers, eight microphone inputs, a digital source switcher, and a digital network server. The digiMIX18 works with every component and offers local control across multiple zones in the facility, including the foyer.
“We came up with some really unique solutions,” Alt says. “There were wood casings that held historical tributes to military personnel. We managed to custom build speakers into those casings without ruining the look and feel. We made a point to really improve the space as a whole and make it work perfectly for them.
“One of the requests from the Army was to manually mix and control audio in the space,” he continues. “When we considered that need, we knew we were going to land on Ashly. The manual mixers are an intuitive addition that allow anyone to quickly make manual adjustments. Ashly also offers full bi-amplification capabilities, is rack mountable, and can keep everything on the network using Dante by Audinate. The Ashly solutions ticked every box we had.”
“The client was very pleased with the result,” Alt concludes. “When you have a big project like this, with an expectation that things look and operate specifically, you want to make sure you’re perfect. Ashly was a key component to that.”
