NASHVILLE, TN – The Nashville Rescue Mission's division for homeless men has been providing food, shelter, medical care and counseling since 1954 – requiring, in return, attendance at worship services. Those services, which include music, are held nightly in a 400-seat chapel, 364 times a year.
As might be expected, the chapel is very basic in design. Scott Oliver, a volunteer musician at the mission and professional sound system designer and integrator at Nashville's Pro Audio Solutions, described it as "400 seats set amidst concrete and tile," with "precious few absorbers and no place to put subwoofers. It is a tremendously challenging acoustical situation."
Oliver and his wife have been leading worship at the service with guitar and vocal performances once a month for the past two years, and he admitted being "tired of playing through the substandard system they had in place" – old stereo left-right boxes.
He welcomed the opportunity to upgrade the system with gear donated by Danley Sound Labs, which let him replace the old boxes with one Danley SH-100B on each side.
The SH-100B effectively wraps a full-range SH-100 in a subwoofer, extending its response down to 50 Hz, and Danley's Synergy Horn technology helps direct energy to the seats without exciting the walls and ceiling.
"I put them up and ran some pink noise," Oliver said, noting that "the response was more perfect right out of the gate than most other systems are after being tortured by EQ. Because the coverage pattern is so tightly held, even to low frequencies, the Danley boxes seem to 'ignore' the acoustical shortcomings of the room. The Danleys deliver clear stereo imaging, honest fidelity, even coverage, and rich low end even at a solid 110 dB."
Oliver also upgraded other elements of the system. "The mission now has a few Heil PR 22 large diaphragm dynamic mics for a detailed front end that, like the Danley loudspeakers, require almost no EQ to sound fantastic," he said. "I include Heil microphones in a lot of my Danley jobs because I think that kind of honesty at the input and output really takes the whole system to the next level."
Oliver also replaced the old amps with a new stereo Crest CC 1800. An existing Yamaha mixer and a Rane DSP continue to serve the mission.
For more information, please visit www.danleysoundlabs.com.
