West Street

Reordering church see's a brand new audio visual system installed

September 2009 saw SFL Group team up with West St Baptist Church in Dunstable. In the midst of a major reordering project, a new sound and video system was required to meet the needs of an ever-growing Church.
 

The criteria for the new audio and visual systems were simple: everyone should be able to see and hear the service without being distracted by technology. However, with a high triple-sided balcony and interrupted sight lines there were challenges in achieving this goal, but a distributed speaker and screen solution was the answer.
 

SFL’s Tim Horton was tasked with spearheading the installation. “In early meetings at the Church it was immediately clear that the size and shape of the building meant we would need to employ a design in which a multi-speaker setup would afford the most even coverage of sound throughout the space.”

Tannoy’s V-series passive speakers were the obvious choice, with a pair of V12HPs as the main system, and a further pair of V8s part-way down the Church to reinforce the high frequency detail lost over distance. This was then repeated upstairs for the balcony area. “With a new fore-stage area built as part of the reordering project, it became apparent that the downstairs V12s would need to be hung very close to the stage to ensure the first few rows would be within the coverage of the speakers. However to stop unwanted feedback occurring from on-stage microphones, particular attention was paid to the horn design (acoustic lens) of the V12s and it was decided to use the ‘HP’ version which has a narrower 75° dispersion allowing the sound only to be focussed into the congregation without impacting the on-stage setup. LARA, a computer-based audio modelling tool, was then used to sanity-check this design and helped to confirm the final speaker placements and positioning.
 

West Street’s Bob Heath, who is responsible for all things technical, was keen to upgrade the aging sound desk and Roland’s M400 digital console was the perfect choice. With 40 channels of input from the stage; 16 auxiliary outputs for monitors and record feeds; and eight matrices to derive the various distributed speaker feeds, the desk had everything necessary and more to enable quick and simple operation for the volunteer sound engineer team.
 

The video system is based around a projection solution, with six additional plasma displays dotted around the auditorium to help where sightlines were impeded. Kramer switchers and control units are used to seamlessly cut from PCs driving song words and power-point slides, to live camera and DVD-based playback feeds. Further Kramer distribution equipment gives the ability to pipe the video feed to each of the screens, the projector and other parts of the building.

A first for SFL was the use of an RS232 control whereby we were able to turn the plasma displays on and off at the push of a button from the control position without walking around with a glut of remotes in hand.