Founded in 1939, St Columba’s College is a co-educational private Catholic day school and sixth form. Facing St Albans Cathedral across the River Ver, the college is built around two historic houses. Former pupils include several professional footballers as well as actor Sacha Baron Cohen.
Clarity’s most recent project at the school was to install sound and video equipment in the school’s chapel.
Lectern and Sound Equipment
A wooden AV lectern was provided with a hard-wearing melamine veneer finish and the school’s logo fitted to the front. The lectern includes a pull-out keyboard tray and a lockable rack for AV equipment. Also included is a slim and discreet lectern mic mounted in an acoustic shock mount that offers excellent pickup of the presenter whilst minimising any unwanted noise from contact with the lectern.
A professional Tascam CD/media player has been mounted in the AV lectern from which the school can easily play music from a CD, USB stick, SD card, Bluetooth or via the 3.5mm mini jack on the front of the unit.
A multi-input audio mixer was installed to manage the sound inputs from the lectern mic, PC, auxiliary point and media player. This enables relative level and basic EQ to be set and is fully labelled for ease of use.
Two high quality column loudspeakers are used to ensure coverage to the back of the space. The Yamaha VXL series line array speakers offer a unique combination of outstanding sound quality and slim form – ideal for religious spaces where you need quality sound whilst being architecturally sympathetic. Line array speakers also offer excellent projection as well as smooth horizontal coverage, making them a great choice for facilities that require maximum intelligibility throughout the listening area, particularly in reverberant spaces.
A Yamaha Power Amplifier delivers up to 2 x 300W at 8 Ohms, which was ideal for the column loudspeakers. It also features onboard limiting, EQ and time alignment and sits discreetly inside the AV lectern.
Video Equipment
Three 50-inch display screens were installed to enable the audience to see PC generated media clearly. These commercial displays have an Ultra HD resolution and are designed for applications where they are used for an extended period of time and accommodate external control via RS232.
One screen was mounted centrally on the wall above some new glass partition doors, and the other two screens were mounted on motorised wall mount lifts, enabling them to be lowered when in use and raised when access for the bifold doors is required.
A 6 input, 8 output, 2-zone video switcher was installed to allow content from a computer to be distributed to each of the installed screen displays. This also enables the video system to be expanded at a later date, for example, if the school wanted to add two further screens mid-way down their space.
A 6-button keypad has been fitted into the AV lectern to enable quick and easy turn on, or off, of all the displays and select a video source for each screen.
As always, to make operation as intuitive as possible, controls have been colour-coded and labelled.
