Built on land donated by local land-owner Hugh de Capell Brooke, and supported by Garry Weston, owner of Associated British Foods, in 2008 the school became an Academy. Although 22 years is relatively short in the life of a building, it is light years in the evolution of sound technology.
School principal, Trish Stringer, recently ordered that the sound system in their flagship 540-seat purpose-built Weston Theatre be upgraded to improve coverage.
AV & theatre technician Peter Jackson, who has been at the school since 1993, certainly had no objection, and became part of the tender process which resulted in Leicester-based Upstage Theatre Supplies being awarded the contract.
Set up 14 years ago by David Brooks, Upstage specified an integrated Harman Professional solution, supported by Sound Technology, UK & Eire distributors of the brand portfolio.
With raked, retractable seating to allow for a reconfigurable flat floor, and the requirement to partition off the front areas for smaller groups in more intimate learning environments, Upstage was alerted to JBL's versatile CBT70J-1 Constant Beamwidth Technology loudspeaker.
One pair down each side operate as stand-alone full range speakers while another pair - wall mounted at the bottom of the raked seating - is combined with CBT70JE-1's; these double length columns provide additional bass response, extended pattern control, and increased sound output levels.
Further down - in front of the stage is a large 12ft x 9ft retractable video screen - are two of the smaller wall-mounted CBT50LA-1 columns, which tend to be used for soundtrack reproduction at film showings. A floor-mounted PRX618X-XLF powered subwoofer can also be switched in and out at will. Four scene sets are stored in a dbx 1261M 12x6 Zone Processor (with ZC8 rotary zone controller).
Crown XTi 4002, 2002 and 1002 amplifiers power the system and handle the processing internally, while up in the control room, a Soundcraft Si Expression 2 24-input mixing desk, with Mini Stage Box 32 (providing 32 analogue inputs and 8 analogue line outputs with four pairs of AES outputs) has replaced the former analogue desk.
Peter Jackson says this solution meets all criteria for flexibility from a discreet column system functioning as a vertical line array - which is far more elegant than the previous highly visible black boxes - and praised Sound Technology's Danny Kyte, for the wisdom of his product selection and subsequent proof of concept, which immediately convinced the school.
This was confirmed by Jackson himself. "I was requested to update a system that had become tired after 20 years - and the look and the style were almost as important as the sound quality and flexibility. Upstage proposed the JBL solution and Sound Technology gave a fantastic onsite demonstration."
The system was commissioned by Ben Todd, head of Sound Technology's Project Team, and the result is a slick, intuitive system installation that will see Brooke Weston well into the future.
(Jim Evans)
