Regarded an one of the top educational facilities in the US, the University of Michigan has installed LEA Professional cloud/IoT-based audio amplifiers its new Central Campus Classroom Building (CCCB).
With more than 1,400 seats, the CCCB is designed to support large innovative and interactive classes, and includes multiple flat-floored, team-based-learning classrooms with 132, 150, and 162 seats, a unique 190-seat ‘classroom in the round’, and more than 350 informal seats throughout the building for students to study and collaborate. This new build needed an equally impressive audio system.
For the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts AV Engineering Team flexibility was key. Previously, LEA Professional had been the amplifier of choice for similar projects including in the relatively new School of Kinesiology Building. Senior AV Project Engineers Jeremy Gerick and Christopher Elly installed 20 LEA Professional Dante Connect Series amplifiers – a mix of 354D, 704D, 84D and 702D models.
Dante Connect Series amplifiers are suited to use in small-to-medium scale installations. With a choice of two, four and eight-channel systems, these Dante-ready amplifiers feature direct HiZ (70V or 100V) or LoZ, selectable by channel. Large or small, designing an audio system based on Dante-connected devices offers many benefits, including nearly limitless system flexibility and scalability, allowing a small AV team to operate as a much larger one, as well as the ability to decentralise system processing, set zones and presets, and easily reconfigure the system as necessary.
‘This project was quite expansive so we chose to install only Dante-enabled components, including the Dante version of the Connect Series,’ Gerick says. ‘This gave us the utmost flexibility, ensuring all elements of the system could talk to each other, avoiding any connectivity issues.’
When it came to the installation of the amplifiers, the LEA Professional Web UI proved both a time saver and a cost saver. The Web UI is LEA Professional’s browser-based interface and allows local monitoring of every amplifier connected to the network from any phone, tablet or PC. In addition, it allows users to view the status of every channel on any given amplifier. This allowed Gerick to constantly monitor the system during install so if there was an issue it could be immediately flagged and dealt with.
With safety protocols in mind, the build out of any large audio system at the university needs to incorporate a fire alarm cut-off system. This ensures that when the fire alarm is sounded, the amplifiers power down so announcements can be heard.
In this case, a fire inspector needed to evaluate this function before the rest of the system was installed. This saved the fire inspector an additional trip to the university after the system was built and saved the team significant time during the installation process.
Outside of the Web UI, the amplifiers, which are used to drive the PA system, as well as the main speakers for lecture content, had many features that Gerick and team value. ‘The amps themselves have a good user interface, the ability to switch between 70V and LoZ is extremely valuable to us, as well as the ability to do impedance measurements on the speaker loads,’ Gerick explains.
In the future, the university plans to use the Connect Series Crestron Control Module to control and monitor essential functions and features within the LEA amplifiers. Third-party control plug-ins like these are part of the LEA Professional control ecosystem, and ensure that LEA products play well with other systems.
The team plan to install the Connect Series in the University’s Modern Languages Building Lecture Room 2, which is being designed as a small cinema experience featuring 5.1 surround sound and a 4K DCI projector from Sony.
‘The customer support is truly excellent at LEA – anytime I had a question I knew I could contact them and get an answer almost immediately,’ Gerick reports. ‘We have had great feedback on the system so far and having LEA play well with all our other components has made my job that bit easier.’
