Wayne State College upgrades with Danley
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At 675 seats, the Ramsey Theatre is the largest of the three, but until recently, the quality of its sound reinforcement system was not commensurate with the quality of the programme. Local AV integration company Adams Production Services recently designed and installed a Danley Sound Labs system that delivers “vastly superior intelligibility and impact at a fraction of the former system’s size”.
“Last year, I updated the PA system in Wayne State College’s gymnasium with six Danley OS80 loudspeakers, and they loved the improvement,” explains Brian Adams, owner of Adams Production Services. “They showed me the system in the Ramsey Theatre, which had recently suffered the failure of its main DSP. They replaced it, but it really called their attention to how bad the entire system sounded. It was comprised of fourteen 90s-era open horns and subwoofer boxes, along with several fills and a ton of amps and amp channels. They were way past due for an entire system overhaul.”
Adams designed a simple Danley system for the Ramsey Theatre. “It comes back to the basic principles of good sound reinforcement design,” he says. “For the same coverage, fewer boxes are always better than more boxes because that minimizes the opportunities for interference and comb filtering. Danley produces a wide range of point-source loudspeakers, which allowed me to choose a single box that would cover almost the entire theatre.”
The new system uses a single Danley SH96HO full-range loudspeaker positioned above the centre edge of the stage to cover the main floor. A pair of column-form, point-source Danley SBH20 loudspeakers cover the small balcony section. The sound booth takes up the centre section of the three-section balcony, and Adams was careful to give that position sound that is representative of the main floor.
Finally, a relatively smaller Danley SH95 fires down at the stage from behind the SH96HO for monitoring. and a four-channel Danley DNA 20k4 Pro amplifier powers the entire system.
(Jim Evans)
