SymNet SIMPLIFIES LIFE AT ROCK HARBOR CHURCH
COSTA MESA, CALIFORNIA JANUARY 2008: Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa, California is a visionary, ultra-contemporary church of 8,000 members that has done an exemplary job of merging the all-too-often disparate worlds of community, daily living, and the church.
In anticipation of their ten-year
anniversary, Rock Harbor dramatically expanded their facilities by acquiring
the 80,000 square-foot building across the street from their church for high
school and junior high classes, offices, youth services, and community
meeting rooms. Their request to AV system designer Paul Dexter was, as the
saying goes, much easier said than done: with audio and video integration,
let any of the seven meeting rooms (including the 200-seat and 500-seat EAW
rooms) be overflow for any of the other meeting rooms. Apart from his audio
prowess, Dexter relied on a SymNet 8x8 open-architecture DSP processor to
deliver Rock Harbor's request with an elegant interface that exceeded the
expectations of everyone, including Dexter himself.
A Grammy-nominated, twenty-year veteran of the studio engineering world,
Dexter has begun to bring the expertise of his finely tuned ears to bear on
the world of installed audio. He won this job with Rock Harbor because of
another seeming miracle he performed for them a few years back. "They had
recently made the happy switch from a portable to a permanent church and had invested several hundred thousand dollars on a sound system for it," he
recalled. "But it sounded terrible. I came in, added some things, took some
things away, and tuned it up to the point where they are now known in Orange
County for how good their system sounds."
Thus, they held Dexter in high regard. Nevertheless, several of the
audio-oriented staff were wedded to the idea of using a DSP other than
SymNet because it was what they knew other churches were using. "What
changed their minds wasn't the DSP capabilities of the SymNet 8x8. They
weren't system designers and therefore couldn't appreciate its strengths,"
he said. "What sold them on SymNet was the ARC-SWK interface controller. It
has four buttons on the left and a knob on the right. It's elegant, solid,
and remarkably easy to use. They thought it was totally cool."
The two larger rooms weave more elaborate stage inputs through Soundcraft
GB2-24 mixers. The mixer outputs feed some of the twenty inputs to the
SymNet system, achieved by adding a SymNet BreakIn12 to the 8x8 DSP core.
The SymNet 8x8 DSP provides all of the processing for the host of EAW MK2396
mains, EAW SB180 subs, and Yamaha monitors used in these two rooms. A SymNet
BreakOut12 brings the SymNet output count to twenty as well.
The smaller rooms use a similar setup, replacing the larger desks with Allen& Heath MixWizard 16:2s and the larger speakers with SoundTube RS600is and
Sonance 623tsqs. QSC CX-series amplifiers provide power for all of Rock
Harbor's new speakers. An iPort in-wall iPod dock allows the receptionist to
play music that any room can access with the push of a button on the SymNet
ARC-SWK controller. Alternatively, two additional iPorts allow the
iPod-toting kids of Rock Harbor to provide their own entertainment in the
rooms where they hang out.
In a nutshell, every room has two outputs: one from its AV desk mixer and
one from a "worry free" microphone. Each mixer output is maintained at unity
so that any other room that listens in can get a good level. Room volume is
controlled from the SymNet ARC-SWK. The "worry free" microphone bypasses the
mixer and goes straight to the SymNet 8x8 DSP, which uses an autogain module
to achieve a perfect output level that's buffered against poor microphone
technique.
"Users simply push a button on the ARC-SWK to select the room they want to
listen to and use the knob to control the volume," said Dexter. "The SymNet
interface made, what is in actuality a very complicated system, very simple
for Rock Harbor. There are two people in charge of audio there, and one
knows content but little about audio technology. She contacted me the first
weekend the system was up and said it was amazing."
Despite its complexity and the fact that Dexter had never programmed a
SymNet unit before, all the programming took less than a day. "I spoke with
my rep for forty minutes and with the very helpful SymNet tech support staff
for forty minutes and was off and running," he said.
Although he could have integrated the SymNet 8x8 DSP to handle the video
switching, Rock Harbor requested that the two systems remain independent so
that one room could listen to another room while focusing on their own
visual information (usually PowerPoint). A camera in the back of each room
feeds an RF modulator. Each room is on a different frequency and a
channel-selectable DVD player in each room can tune across those frequencies
to select the channel (room) they want to watch. Dexter's design originally
called for video projectors, but an $80,000 budget cut forced him to make
changes in the least noticeable places. As a consequence, 60-inch Panasonic
plasma displays provide video in the larger rooms while 47"-inch Vizio LCD
panel displays provide video in the smaller rooms.
ABOUT SYMETRIX
For more information on professional audio products from Symetrix, SymNet,
Lucid and AirTools please call (425) 778-7728 or refer to websites, Symetrix audio, Symnet audio, airtools audio and lucid audio.
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