Following a spend of £1.4m the building, which had fallen into disrepair, has been converted into a multi-cultural arts, community, educational and Welsh Language Centre, incorporating a new 250-seat amphitheatre; this has been equipped with an end-to-end Harman Pro sound system, supplied Sound Technology and installed by Adlib.
The project is the brainchild of the Soar Project's chief officer, Lis McLean, who secured a total of 13 grants - including £527K from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £300,000 from Heads of the Valleys funding programme - with contributions coming from their own Welsh language bookshop, based in the adjacent vestry opposite. But she says the dream for a Welsh community centre of this nature had its origins as far back to 1987.
The driving force behind the flexible multimedia technology - which would bridge the auditorium with dance studios and recording rooms downstairs - was local musician and former London-based pro audio specialist Tim Gray. Brought in to advise Ms McLean, the former Harman Pro reseller contacted his close associate Nick Bellis at Sound Technology. At a site meeting both men agreed that a line array was the only solution.
Liverpool-based Adlib Audio, in addition to the audio, also equipped the building with conventional lighting bars, dimmer racks and LED effects to highlight the magnificent pipe organ, video projection onto an electric dropdown screen and drapes (provided by J&C Joel) to envelop the room, matched to the Welsh tartan tweed of the reupholstered original pews.
JBL's VRX system was installed in two phases. Initially hangs of two VRX932LA enclosures and single VRX918S 18in sub were flown each side in a left and right configuration. The main hangs were later bolstered by a third flown VRX932LA per side, while a centre cluster of two VRX932LA speakers were added during second phase installation works. Along with the flown additions, two pairs of ground-stacked SRX718S's Subs (for use as necessary) and six SRX712M 12in speakers were introduced; four of the latter were used as conventional stage monitors and the other two flown as out-fills across the bleachers.
At the same time a Soundcraft Vi1 digital desk was installed in the theatre's front-of-house position.
Flexible digital audio networking is under the command of a BSS Soundweb London BLU-160 DSP, with a BLU3 wall-mount remote offering local control, and the system is powered by five Crown MA5000i amplifiers (two 2500W/4 ohms), with an XTi4000 (two 1200W/4 ohms) handling monitors.
Adlib introduced a custom switch panel in the amplifier rack to control audio signal flow within the Soundweb devices. The configuration uses the Logic features within London Architect software to introduce additional auxiliary feeds from the Vi1 console through to each zone of the FOH loudspeaker system to best suit each engineer's mixing preference.
(Jim Evans)
