Sorry all -- I should have known from all my other posts on the Booth that more info was needed -- I was just exhausted when I was posting the other day.
High school renovation -- brand new lighting and sound systems being installed in a geodesic
dome auditorium. Capacity currently is 1k however, with the addition of a balcony, we should be up to 1.2k when all is said and done.
A
line array has been spec'd due to the programming, the space, and the
decibel level required. Choral, orchestral, jazz, rock, theater, drama, dance, you name it, its happens on this
stage. Being a
dome, its a weird space and has some flutter echos. New clouds being installed w/ absorption and
reflection as well as absorption
curtains on the walls. The balcony is 80'+ from the proposed
array -- sort of a long narrow room so the AV consultant has proposed a significant amount of boxes near the top of the
array at a 0º to get the sound out there.
Under balcony fills will exist as well as front fills.
Budget, around $100,000 for the
array, maybe more depending.
Not married to any specific manufacture, however, based on recommendations by many local acousticians and live sound engineers, the SLS boxes will not deliver as the AV consultant promised. Nexo, sort of being the next in
line in terms of pricing and quality has been suggested as an alternate.
Coverage plots have been developed for both systems and seem to indicate that 10 box per side Nexo will have the same approx. coverage as a 20 box per side SLS.
Ribbon
line array? Don't think they would end up being as durable in the long run -- especially with the high decibels needed for MANY rock/talent shows every year. We are intending for this to be a rented space as well and I don't want to have to worry about a delicate
speaker that won't take well to the abuse an untrained sound engineer can dish out.
The Nexo
speaker looks much more durable and has many more hanging and rigging options. I'm still pushing to make sure this
system is on motors and not
dead-hung so it can be brought in easily for service or re-aiming as I'm sure they aren't going to get it right the first time -- the room is too weird. Also, esthetically, a 20 cab
system is huge in that room, almost hits the top of the floor mounted subs (Dual Nexo 18" per side -- it would seem a full Nexo
system would make sense...) The 10 cab
system even with slightly larger boxes is much more pleasing and will not look so hulking.
Ethersound (or another digital
protocol) is a must.
Console (
Yamaha M7CL-32) needs to be able to
plug in not only from the booth but also at mix position in the
house. I'm feeding a full 32
channel analog
snake from the
stage to the
console at both positions, however, I have a rack of 16 wireless located in the booth w/ digital preamps that wants to be routed to the
console at mix position without actually moving the rack (its got a lot of other gear in it, and moving anything of that size out of the booth and down some stairs really isn't an option). Hence, expansion slots being used for some digital
protocol to get control over the digital pre-amps (not worried about remote
gain control).
Ethersound may
play in in another way too. We've got a "daily use" rack backstage which needs to feed through into the processing and amps backstage. If a DME was installed back
stage with the appropriate cards, it could take signal from the "daily use" rack and feed it the processors, but it could also take signal from the wireless rack in the booth and feed it via Ethersound to the
console. A simple
ethercon patch would need to be made to transfer the control from booth to mix position. Assuming we are sending signal up the Ethersound, and since its bi-directional, all sends to processing could be made via Ethersound as well -- leaving all 16 analog omni outs on the
console for direct returns to the
stage.
Thanks for all your thoughts -- looking forward to reading your responses.