ERIE, PA — Scott R. Riedel & Associates used Aviom’s Pro64 digital snake to simplify audio distribution for the PA and recording setup at First Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. “The previous systems the church had were too simple for what they wanted to accomplish and didn’t give them the flexibility to do anything outside of basic speech reinforcement,” said Riedel lead AV design consultant David Hosbach. Even there, “the system didn’t allow for good intelligibility of the spoken word.”
The church had recently renovated its sanctuary with updates to its AV system, pipe organ and room acoustics. The system needed to be able to distribute audio signals from the front of house position in the sanctuary’s balcony and also to accommodate the recording of worship services and concerts.
Signal distribution posed a significant challenge because of the distance the signal was going to need to travel. In addition, many of the walls at First Presbyterian Church of the Covenant are plaster-covered brick and stone, making the installation of any additional conduit difficult and costly.
The Aviom system preserved the signal integrity over long cable runs, and because the system uses Cat-5 cable, the need to install numerous runs of 2-inch-diameter rigid and thinwall conduit from one end of the facility to the other was avoided.
“Aviom came into play because it gave us the ability to run Cat-5 network cable down from the balcony to the racks in the basement instead of a whole bunch of individual copper cable lines. This made the whole installation process easier,” Hosbach said. “In addition we were able to get into the digital domain sooner and stay there longer, and in the process could deliver the clear, natural and noise-free sound quality and system flexibility the church was looking for.”
Mic lines from the chancel area where the choir is seated are fed into an Aviom Pro64 6416m Mic Input Module, which provides the necessary phantom power, signal gain through the module’s head amp function, and compiles all of the signals down to a single Cat-5 routed to the balcony where the front of house is located. Front of house signals are routed into a Yamaha M7CL digital console equipped with two Aviom 6416Y2 A-Net Interface Cards.
John Malek president of Ann Arbor Audio, the systems integrator and co-designer for the project, also credited the Aviom Pro64 system for giving operators at the church the “ability to tweak individual input channels and head amp gain from the Balcony mix location so they can achieve a higher performance than with any previous sound system.
“The church members of the construction team were just blown away with the new audio setup when it was first turned on,” Malek added. “They just were raving about how good it sounded because they’d never had a system in there before that even came close, let alone reinforce sound at this level of speech intelligibility.”
Malek also commended Aviom for its customer support. “Working with the Aviom staff has made the process of implementing the revised design and optimizing the final sound quality much easier.”
For more information, please visit www.aviom.com.
