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Church House Conference Centre Unveils New Look with Assistance from Radia Pro and Kelsey
Just over a year after Church House Conference Centre in Westminster closed its doors for major building work, the Grade II-listed landmark re-opened this spring to reveal a complete overhaul of the main Assembly Hall, the largest room in the house – aided by Radia Pro components and a Kelsey Acoustics cabling solution.
Owned by the Corporation of the Church House, and designed by renowned architect Sir Herbert Baker in 1939, the building serves as the headquarters of the Church of England; when the general synod is not in session it is let for corporate banquets, conferences and seminars.
The original, fixed tiered seating has been removed and replaced with a level floor; this gives the hall much more versatility and the ability to cater for theatre style conferences and meetings for up to 664, and gala dinners and banquets for up to 372.
Technical consultant, Nigel Luby was first approached by The Conference Centre’s technical supervisor Ben Pain in 2005 to carry out an acoustic analysis. This duly led to his company AVSYS.DC completely renewing the A/V system in the main Assembly Hall (and four smaller rooms), placing them all on a single network.
The acoustics specialist has built plenty of headroom into the cabling infrastructure to cater for future growth and the requirements of other production companies and broadcasters using the venue. At the same time he has ensured the system interfaces with the venue’s broadcast studio and the IT network.
However, the real feature of AVSYS.DC’s installation is its bespoke nature, with custom solutions devised for almost every problem encountered in the acoustically-unforgiving rotunda.
Nigel Luby was indebted to the help provided by Fuzion plc, in advising on a ribbon driver delayed solution around the perimeter of the balcony area using Radia Pro drivers. Sister company Kelsey Acoustics, meanwhile, supplied all the cabling, including 370 lines of Starquad analogue cable, SP/DIF digital audio tie lines, digital coax video and BBC-spec triax cable. The whole system is run bi-directional.
“I always use Kelsey Acoustics because the kind of service I receive is exceptional. They supplied all the cable except the CAT6.”
When budget permits he says he would generally favour a Starquad multi and Starquad single cable solution. “These are double twisted pairs so you can guarantee the effective cancellation of any externally-inducted noise. The first time I really appreciated its value was on talkback systems – when the amount of noise picked up on a single line-balanced cable was thoroughly irritating.”
At the Church House Nigel Luby’s principle concern was the potential for reverberation under a glass-domed roof once the fixed raked seating had been sacrificed in favour of flattened floor.
“I knew that the creation of two parallel surfaces would increase the potential for flutter echo,” he said. The fact that the loudspeakers needed to be architecturally-discreet provided further pressure.
After treating the patterned glass ceiling section with RPG acrylic ClearSorber to act as a diffuser, Nigel Luby was forced to abandon the idea of using recessed flat panel loudspeaker technology because the gallery walls were already heavily treated with an acoustic material which turned out to be asbestos. “It would have meant shutting the building down for six months – which would have been near-impossible and extremely expensive.”
However, at the Frankfurt Pro Light+Sound Show he was introduced to Radia Pro technology by Tony Oates, managing director of Fuzion plc (the UK distributors). This has enabled him to design 12 x custom cabinets, each containing three Radia Pro planar ribbon drivers and a pair of 4in drivers.
“Generally, these are used to provide a true line array effect, with wide horizontal and narrow vertical coverage,” says Luby. “But because of the dispersion angles, simply turning these vertical enclosures on their side would not have worked. By splitting the drivers up, you would be breaking the line array effect by spacing them apart.”
Fuzion set up a ribbon driver demo at their headquarters in Surrey, and AVSYS saw how the drivers could be housed in custom trapezoidal enclosures, tilted 30° off the horizontal, to great effect.
“The result has been remarkable,” agrees Nigel Luby. “These speakers are generally required for fairly low-level BGM and speech reinforcement and also provide very high levels of audio, as it turns out – and they deliver a really crisp and clean top end, with no colouring or hotspots.” Running as a pelmet line right round the auditorium, some of the 12 recessed enclosures are grouped and form their own independent zones for processing purposes.
Providing the sound on the main floor are eight conventional speakers, with CD rotatable horn in a custom-colour finish which matches the décor.
The whole system is powered by a combination of five Camco Quadro Vortex 3s from Fuzion (running 20 channels of the inner rings and gallery speakers) and a further eight channels of Vortex 4, assigned to the sub bass and the Neutrik Speakon outlets, either side of the stage.
The consultant also used all the experience gained working on venues like the London Coliseum and BBC Radio Theatre to ensure future-proofing – so that the venue would require no expensive retro-fitting of cable at a later stage. He has provided a generous quantity of easy-access floor traps, with clearly-identified patchbays and a fully-redundant system to allow the backbone to be plugged into by incoming production.
Aside from the audio, video and data cables he has also made provision for 18 x 2.5K DMX dimmer circuits per side to accommodate production lighting.
There are also three mix positions – two facing each other on the gallery, and one at floor level, while the MADI link provides the opportunity to bring in digital mixing consoles where necessary.
“We are running Cat6 cable to every box so whether it’s sending video/ audio or control data you can cross patch out of the server in the AV control room to any box in the auditorium, and plug in a laptop. In fact with three servers (and a main) you can patch to anywhere in the building.” In total, there are around 700 CAT6 sockets distributed throughout the Conference Centre.
Ben Pain says the installation has been a huge success. “I think we staged eight conference events here during the whole of June 2005 before closing down. Already this year we have had 24 events booked in for June, and we have all the equipment we need to run a full audiovisual presentation.
“The fact is that we are now able to control anything from anywhere in the building and send it anywhere in the building … or the world.
25th May 2007
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