The renovation of the venue, previously a social club, which was started in August last year and is due to be completed later this month, took the building back to 'bare bones' allowing the audio installation to be designed utilising newly fitted Cat5e points. The venue is currently used primarily to host church services for the 220+ church members, but once the renovation is complete, the intention is to hire out the building to the community to use as a conference centre or hall. The audio solution therefore needed to be digital with a flexible setup to cater for a number of uses from varying live band setups to a single microphone.
With a background in professional theatre, church member Steve Dennis had a clear idea of the features he was looking for and having previously seen a demonstration of the Roland M-400 running over Cat 5e at the Torch Theatre, he was happy for Neal Tomlinson of Stage Electrics to specify a similar setup, but using the smaller M-300. The M-300 is used in a front of house position in the large main hall with the S-1608s racked with the amplifiers in a room adjacent to the stage. The stage area also features hard patched XLR's so that visiting bands can patch easily into the existing setup.
"The audio solution had to be digital and the ability to run over Cat5e was important as the building will have several different areas such as an auditorium upstairs, function rooms and a coffee shop," commented Dennis. "In future we want to be able to move the equipment around and be fully functional in all rooms. The M-300 is a great solution for us, easy to use and easy to setup with the Cat5e and the menus on the M-300 are really intuitive which means that those using the desk rarely have any problems finding what they want - such as recalling a scene - and if they do, I can easily talk them through it over the phone."
"The M-300 is an ideal scalable solution for small to medium sized venues and is also lightweight and transportable. We have had a great deal of success specifying the M-300 for this type of venue and had some great feedback from customers who have really started to unlock the potential of this powerful little console," commented Neal Tomlinson.
(Jim Evans)
