Vault 634's owner has invested $3m in renovations that will ready the space for weddings, parties, fundraisers, and the like for up to 250 people while preserving the building's rich history. As part of that renovation, integration firm Sage Technologies (Mount Joy, Pennsylvania) designed and installed a sound reinforcement system based on Danley SBH-Series columnar point-source loudspeakers, which complement the room's distinguished aesthetic while providing excellent pattern control, phase coherence, and fidelity.
"The owner and his associates brought us into the project complaining that the few events that they had already had suffered from terrible sound," said Scott Steffan, A/V systems specialist with Sage Technologies. "They had used pole speakers for those events, and no one could understand what was being said. It's no wonder. All the room's hard surfaces add up to a huge reverb time. Despite their bad experiences with the pole speakers, they requested not just a good sound system, but a perfect sound system."
Steffan designed the permanent system to use two Danley SBH-10s for main coverage and painted them to blend into the background. They're stacked vertically to effectively create one even longer column loudspeaker. He covered the sizable raised mezzanine at the back of the room with a Danley SBH-20, which is half the height of the SBH-10 and has a wider beam width.
Biamp Nexia processing handles the modest input mixing for a number of floor boxes, two wireless microphones, and music playback devices, and a Crestron system gives the staff intuitive control over their volumes and mutes. A remarkably modest 125W per channel from Lab Gruppen E-Series amplifiers power the Danley SBH loudspeakers. Citing the room's inability to effectively absorb loud, low bass, Steffan opted against installing subwoofers and instead dialed in a bit more bass from the SBH-10s.
(Jim Evans)
