• Design
• Installation
• Project Management

The Church of Epiphany is nestled in the picturesque hillside town of Crafers, South Australia. This charming location, a short drive from the city of Adelaide, makes it ideally suited for boutique receptions and corporate functions. The newly built Anne Jolly Hall in the Church of Epiphany complex was earmarked for a complete audio visual system design to further enhance its unique qualities and strengths.

Integrated Audio Solutions was approached by Tim Freedman from rental specialists Allpro Audio, to design, supply and install a cost effective, turnkey AV system for the parish. The aim was to maximize efficiency and to augment the flexibility offered in the Anne Jolly Hall’s attractive layout and design.

System Design Brief
This initial site meeting revealed the hall’s large untreated surfaces where contributing to the speech and music intelligibility for the parish meetings and functions.

Even before the AV system design was finalised the halls problematic acoustics were analyzed and a solution was mapped out. Only then was a total design solution implemented, taking into consideration the hall’s problematic acoustic artifacts. Careful thought was also given to the simple operational functionality of the audio-visual system. This two-stage design approach enabled Integrated Audio Solutions to offer an immediate improvement to in-room sound quality.

Acoustic Treatment
The key to this two stage process was to initially treat the halls wall to ceiling intersections where the reflective sound accumulates first. This included the careful positioning and installation of eight (8) Primacoustics Broadway two (2) inch thick panels. These were placed at angles in the corners acting as effective sound traps. Made from wool fibre, the Primacoustics panels allow for excellent absorption properties (some of the highest rated in the industry) and are certified fire rating to Australian Standards AS/NZS 1530.3.

This minimal approach worked and were immediately evident to members of the Church of Epiphany congregation and guests. Positive comments made after a parish meeting held in the middle of the hall centered on how “speech was now intelligible with no need to raise our voices”.

The Audio System
Careful consideration was then given to the choice of speakers for the rooms performance and esthetics. In the case of the Anne Jolly Hall in the Church of Epiphany complex, the Electro-Voice white ZX1i’s where the perfect choice, a side from their stellar performance these compact speakers offer ease-of-fitting via their SAM mount brackets.The EV ZX1i rotatable waveguides also allow for tailored placement of the speakers sound dispersion, minimizing the acoustic footprint and keeping the sound away from the reflective ceiling and walls.

The system electronics is neatly housed in a durable wall mounted equipment rack. The amplification heart is via the new Dynacord (sister company to Electro-Voice and part of the Bosch Group of companies) C 1300 FDI fixed installation series DSP amplifier.The amplifier has fully integrated speaker processing with FIR – Drive Technology allowing fully optimized component correction (making for a sonically great speaker) and complete speaker component protection.

The audio mixing duties are superbly managed via the Audac CPR12 feature packed analogue mixer, allowing for six(6) microphone / line inputs with equalization and four (4) background music (BGM) all assignable to master one or master two outputs / zones. A handy feature is the PFL monitoring function which is fed to an onboard speaker. This very convenient function allows for the checking of inputs, even when the mixer is racked in another room.

The wireless microphone of choice for the design was the Electro-Voice R 300 HD Handheld, a robust all metal cost effective radio microphone receiver/transmitter with excellent gain-before feedback qualities. An antenna front mounting extension kit was incorporated to maximize performance.

Audio Visual Wall Panel
A custom heavy duty audio visual wall panel with box cover was incorporated in the Anne Jolly Hall allowing for four microphone inputs (two additional wireless at the equipment rack), two having the capability of line level (M5L/M6L) combo inputs, and two MP3 L/R inputs where normalized to the mixers BGM inputs. VGA and HDMI video inputs where also incorporated feeding the HDMI switchers inputs. An expansion slot was also incorporated for future needs.

Vision
A simple HDMI 4×2 matrix mixer was installed allowing for the Set Top box, Blu-ray DVD player, and the HDMI and VGA video inputs from the hall’s A/V panel to be outputted to the Epson projector.

The Anne Jolly Hall equipment rack is housed in a separate storeroom. To allow for this an R/F extender kit was installed so that all the remotes could effectively “see around corners”.