Dr. Rees contracted A-Dec Dental to refit the dental laboratory with workstations containing the tools that a dentist would use on a live patient and "phantom heads", mannequins which the students use to practice "drill and fill" techniques. Each student is equipped with their own 15" flat screen multimedia display to view the tutorial and they can hear commentary from the tutors' radio microphones through their own local loudspeakers.
Scotia installed a sophisticated control desk from where the tutor could demonstrate procedures to the students using visual aids such as an operating microscope, remote controlled ceiling cameras, object display camera and a wireless radio camera. The compact wireless camera, only several inches in size, allows the tutor to move around the trainingsuite and show any student's work to the rest of the class.
Scotia decided the Allen & Heath iDR-8 processor was the best product to manage the audio processing: "The audio requirements in a venue such as this are complex. All source devices must be capable of being relayed to all or some students at a level which is clearly audible and loud enough to be heard over the hiss and whine of drills and hydraulic suction pipes. However, it must be quiet enough not disturb adjacent students who are perhaps working"offline" from the main session. In addition, the tutor is often walking around the lab with a radio microphone and could very well be standing right beside a student's loudspeakers," commented Scotia's director, Gordon McLoughlin.
"It allows full control of all signal distribution and has been a superb example of invisible audio control - it works and you don't know it is there! All levels can be controlled at the Tutor's 15" touch-screen so everything from the sound of a DVD distributed to all screens or a comment from the Tutor directed to an individual group is set here. Automatic recall of stored settings is easily done using the iDR-8's powerful patch setting resources."
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
