Menlo Park church upgrades with Tannoy

17 October 2011

USA - "It is always disappointing when church technical teams have their expectations for a new system threatened by budgetary limitations," explains Michael Garrison, founder and owner of Michael Garrison Associates, a system design/consultation firm that has worked with churches all over the United States. "This was the exact situation we walked into at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church."

Located in Menlo Park, California, the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church originally commissioned plans for a comprehensive building renovation in 2007. The renovation included all new theatre seats, a major stage redesign as well as modern technical systems, including a concert-level line array and an electronic 'variable' acoustic system to support the diverse types of services and music performed in the room.

"Our mission was to come up with creative design solutions that would meet as many of their original goals as possible within their new financial reality," says Michael Garrison.

MGA arranged for the church to visit several similar-sized facilities where they were able to hear a number of different manufacturers' speaker systems, including Tannoy's VQ series. "We really liked the sound quality and even coverage of the VQ system," says Fulton, leading them to request a demo in their own facility before making their final decision.

"We were familiar with Tannoy's VQ Series of loudspeakers, so we were confident it would work well in this room, and it did," explains MGA Project Manage Daniel Durst, who worked closely with Fulton throughout the project. "The church really liked the high-fidelity sound at concert levels which was a requirement for the more contemporary services. The VQ Series was the ideal solution."

"Because of the high efficiency of the VQ loudspeakers, we were able to achieve substantially greater sound levels within the constraints of the existing available electrical power and equipment rack space," adds Garrison. "This would not have been the case with a typical line array system, and resulted in significant cost savings to the project."

MGA also supplied an Avid Venue D-Show system with Pro Tools HD and a total of 96 inputs and 16 outputs. Two BSS Soundweb London processors, rack mounted in the amp room, provide all signal processing for the loudspeaker systems, including crossover, intra-array timing, equalization, and signal delay for supplemental delay speakers.

Garrison adds that "we really like the power, flexibility, control and ease of use of the BSS London products."

(Jim Evans)