Finally in a position to graduate from set-up/tear-down meetings in a school – a model it had employed for around 11 years – the southwest campus of the six-site Austin Stone church in the Austin, Texas, area embarked on a ground-up new-build. Under the direction of Director of Integration Zach Richards and Integration Project Manager Joe Johnson, Denver-area-based Brown Note Productions (which has a satellite AVL Systems Integration office in Austin) spearheaded the design and install of A/V systems, including essentials for wireless RF and IEM systems.
The project presented a unique challenge in having numerous spaces with varying requirements for of wireless audio, and the wireless system needing to support many different types of events throughout. While the majority of the wireless need is in the main auditorium, there is an outdoor stage, a youth room and two kids’ spaces, as well as three classrooms and a lobby area.
‘All of us on the team are on the same page, recognising RF Venue as the standard for RF antennas and distribution,’ Johnson says. ‘They are the third-party system that works with all the wireless brands. Everyone here just trusts that they’re that good.’
To meet Austin Stone’s brief, Brown Note opted for 26 channels of Shure ULX-D Digital Wireless (based in part on its Dante capabilities), along with eight channels of Sennheiser ew-IEM G4 in-ear monitoring. Brown Note chose RF Venue’s new CP Architectural and Diversity Architectural antennas, painted satin black to seamlessly blend in with the facility’s stage architecture, along with RF Venue’s Distro4 RF distribution systems for mics and Combine8 IEM transmitter combiner.
‘We installed a Distro4 to distribute the Diversity Architectural antenna signal from the main auditorium to all the wireless receivers,’ Johnson says. ‘We also fed all of the IEM transmitters into a Combine8 which fed a single CP Architectural antenna. All the antennas we used worked flawlessly.’
The smaller classrooms were also equipped with RF Venue solutions: ‘We worked closely with RF Venue’s Adam Brass and Don Boomer to determine our solution for those spaces,’ Johnson continues. ‘We had just one channel of audio in each classroom and then a couple of channels for the youth rooms.
‘We’re using the QSC Q-Sys control, and we’re already using Dante for all of our distribution for audio. What made sense was to upgrade the microphone systems to Shure ULX-D, and then we were able to just put the receivers in the remote racks, which made things easy for routing audio anywhere we wanted to.
‘But then we thought, “if that works in theory, how do we get the microphone signal from all these individual classrooms into the remote racks?” Working with Don, we came up with a plan to implement Diversity Architectural antennas in each of these classrooms. And then we used 4Zone antenna combiners to take all these different antenna signals and combine them for a single receiver to use. So now we could take a four-channel receiver and put a single mic in four different rooms and put an antenna in each of these rooms and feed it all back into the singular receiver, making things highly efficient.
‘And visually it’s very low impact – these antennas just disappear if you’re not looking for them. All the classrooms have is a single microphone sitting in a charging station, and all the operator has to do is turn on that microphone and go to the touch screen and turn up the volume, and it works just how they would want it to.’
The final ‘insurance’ for good clean wireless was Brown Note’s use of RF Venue Band-pass Filters on all the antenna systems.
‘In the main auditorium, RF Venue Band-pass Filters are in between both the Diversity Architectural antenna and an outdoor Diversity Fin antenna [for the outdoor stage] and the Distro4 to filter out any unneeded frequencies,’ Johnson says. ‘We worked very purposely with both the Shure and the Sennheiser system to spec those in different frequency ranges so they wouldn’t interfere with each other, but we wanted to add an additional layer of protection against intermodulation and things of that nature to ensure as clean of an RF signal as possible and eliminate any dropouts in all of the microphone systems.
‘We only spec products that we know we can stand behind,’ Johnson reflects. ‘Whether it comes to speakers or audio consoles, lighting fixtures – or, in this case, RF antennas and distribution – we draw a line and we say, ‘This is what we do, and it’s because we trust this.’ And that is RF Venue.’
More: www.rfvenue.com
