A 400-capacity conference and event space in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, The View at Fountains occupies the top floor of a multi-purpose building occupied by class-A office space, restaurants, retail shops and, in the future, apartment units. The glass lends the space its name also makes it acoustically challenging – a challenge compounded by tile flooring, an exposed concrete ceiling and dry walls.
Reluctant to compromise the visual aesthetic, A/V integration firm Centerline Audio Visual has used Danley Sound Labs SH95 loudspeakers to keeping where needed, rather than bouncing off the walls and ceiling.
‘Scott Graby owns the building and is also the sound tech at Franklin Road Baptist Church, where we had done some work involving Danley loudspeakers,’ explains Centerline Audio Visual owner, Scott Oliver. ‘The View at Fountains is a beautiful event centre that is perfect for weddings, conferences and banquets. Unfortunately, all of the reflective surfaces in the room caused a lot of intelligibility problems.’
‘Scott [Oliver] did a room profile of the space, and his graph showed sound bouncing all over the place,’ Graby says ‘He put together a quote for sound absorption panels that was not only costly but, would have marred the aesthetic of the space. As an aside, he mentioned past success with Danley loudspeakers in challenging spaces and was curious about whether we could reduce the number of acoustic panels by swapping our existing loudspeakers. Apparently, the profile showed that they might eliminate the need for sound absorption panels altogether.’
Using the existing amplifier and the subwoofer, Oliver swapped in a pair of Danley SH95 loudspeakers with their projects a 95° (h) by a 55° (v) coverage. ‘Danley offers what I like to call smear-free performance,’ Oliver says. ‘A typical horn-woofer loudspeaker is inherently smeared all by itself and placing it in a reflective environment just amplifies the smear. In contrast, Danley output is phase-coherent out of the box and minimizss reflections with tight pattern control.’
‘The difference has been transformative,’ Graby agrees. ‘We no longer get complaints about echo, and we’ve not added a single sound absorption panel. I’m not sure how this is even possible, but I’m very impressed.’
More: www.danleysoundlabs.com
