A Northamptonshire Academy school was issued with an increased budget which they elected to use to upgrade their 2 theatres AV equipment, they elected to use AVM Solutions UK to do this. They had 2 halls they needed upgrading, a smaller hall used for their younger students which needed a whole new suite of equipment and their main hall which was used for a number of things, including school assemblies and school productions. The client required increased control and more features such as being able to display content through the projector from their laptops and increased control over their lighting system in their main hall. The also requested that any equipment that was installed would be done so that it fit into the aesthetic of the room and was only accessible to the schools IT team via the use of a lock and key.
We began by building the rack for the smaller hall that would control the speakers and the projector. The core of this rack is a switcher/scaler; connected into which is an Apple TV and a HDMI, VGA and audio cable. The Apple TV connects to the clients LAN while the three cables are fed to a faceplate which will be mounted on the rack; this allows the client to plug one of their own devices into the system, for example a laptop. The Atlona then has two outputs, a HDMI and an audio output. The HDMI output goes into the client’s projector and the audio output connects into a Stageline inline mixer, also inputted into the mixer are two wireless microphones, one handheld and the other a theatre mic. The outputs then connect into a Crown amplifier; this then connects into 2 separate sets of speakers. The 2 sets of speakers were asked for by the client, they required 2 different zones of speakers that could be isolated for different applications. The rack was built into a credenza unit to fit in with the look of the hall and keep things neat.
We then began working in the main hall; the client already had 2 Kramer switches installed in separate racks, one in the control room and the other in a lectern in the hall. The problem they had with their existing system was that everything had to be done manually so we touch panels, one in the lectern and the other in the control room. These then connect to 2 integrated controllers, one in the lectern rack and the other in the control room rack. These are what add the automation to the already existing system by connecting to the Kramer switches that are already in the racks as well as being connected to the LAN. The 2 integrated controllers’ control what was originally manually controlled which in this case is the projector screen, the curtain, the lighting desk and the projector. We also connected the two Kramer switched together by using TV One HDMI Cat5 RX’s which convert HDMI signal so it can be transported across a Cat5 cable and then come back out as HDMI.
After the system was set up we tested it to make sure it fit the client’s needs and was up to a high standard.