After 11 years of daily use, the sound system at Pensacola Christian College's Crowne Centre had begun to show its age. The once state-of-the-art audio system was beginning to exhibit minor failures and glitches. Commercial audio contractor All Pro Sound of Pensacola, Fla., knew what to do to bring the complex audio system back to the high-quality standards required by the college.
“We didn't just want this to be a glorified repair job—we wanted the new system to be more powerful and user-friendly, to be ‘future proof' and to provide many years of reliable service,” says John Fuqua, vice president of All Pro Sound. “We have worked with Pensacola Christian College for 30 years and have a great understanding of their expectations for quality and function.” As the system designer and installer of the original audio system, All Pro Sound was able to provide a comprehensive plan for the upgrade to meet both the college's unique functional requirements, as well as a very aggressive time line.
[Editor's Note: An article on the original tech system was published in the May/June 2002 issue of Church Production Magazine.]
Pensacola Christian College (PCC) and its affiliates, Pensacola Christian Academy and Pensacola Theological Seminary, comprise a ministry whose reach extends far beyond its Gulf Coast campus. Via the Rejoice Broadcast Network's radio station, WPCS (89.5 FM), the college broadcasts all-Christian Rejoice Radio to nearly two million Upper Gulf Coast residents and across the Minneapolis/St. Paul area 24 hours a day. In addition, the combination of 38 satellite stations across the United State and streaming on the Internet at Rejoice.org give the network a global outreach. “Rejoice in the Lord,” the weekly telecast of PCC's campus church services, airs internationally on the Daystar network and is streamed on the Internet at RejoiceTV.org.
Jump-starting the pulseAt the heart of the college’s activities is the Crowne Centre—a 298,000-square-foot, 6,035-seat multipurpose auditorium. The auditorium and state-of-the-art sound system were cleverly engineered back in 2001 to serve the many needs of PCC’s thriving academic community. Its chapel provides a worship space, as well as a venue for productions and concerts. The main auditorium’s under-balcony seating areas can be reconfigured into three separate 500-seat lecture halls. The building also houses spacious orchestra and choir rehearsal areas, two 200-seat wedding chapels with hospitality rooms, and a stand-alone reception area.
Architecturally striking, with its tall, jewel-like faceted glass front sections and ultramodern curved interior, one of the most remarkable and innovative features of the auditorium is a two-story, 110-foot revolving stage platform that provides flexibility in scheduling back-to-back events. With a semi-permanent church set on one side and a more conventional thrust stage on the reverse, the rotating platform allows the venue to host a variety of events while still having regular church services in the same space on Sunday morning.
Yet, even a notable beauty will begin to show its age. “In February of 2012, our sound system began to experience some functional problems due to the age of the components,” reflects Greg Moses, PCC's director of media productions. “These devices had served us well, but the FOH [front-of-house] console was failing and the signal processing components were emitting random clicks and pops.”
The original audio installation, designed back in 2001, has been maintained through the years by John Fuqua and All Pro Sound in conjunction with Pensacola Christian College technical staff. Seeing the system's performance in decline, they knew an upgrade was needed. “We had been keeping watch on the system and had been working on a replacement strategy for over a year prior to the refit,” Fuqua reports.
So the decision was made to replace key audio components to revitalize Crowne Center's audio system, and two Harman Studer Vista 9 digital audio consoles were purchased—one for FOH and one for the school's broadcast production suite. Studer's flagship Vista 9 console constitutes a significant upgrade from the previous equipment, and won out in the team's evaluation for its large input and output capabilities, configurability and superior sonic quality. “The mixing flexibility of the Studer Vista 9 system made it the obvious choice once the owners had looked at all the options for this size mixing environment,” says Fuqua.
Jewels of the system
Both consoles boast 42-fader mixing surfaces and run a total of 212 inputs with 32 main outs, 48 matrix sends and 32 aux sends. The broadcast console is programmed for dynamic automation (required for remixing the musical portions of the church services and concert events) and is equipped with a 48-track MADI recording interface. “We needed consoles that could handle both live sound and broadcast mixing needs, and the Vista 9 is versatile enough to be optimized for both applications,” Fuqua says. “It makes life much easier to have the same brand and model of console—especially since both are networked together.”
Several Studer engineers, James Tunnicliffe and Paul Shorter, were on site during final setup and commissioning of the new system. They provided Studer system programming assistance, as well as technical training along with All Pro Sound's technical staff. The installation, configuration and training were completed on schedule. In set up, as well as in daily operation, the user-friendly and ergonomic design of the console's mixing surface proved to be one of the strong suits of the system.
Interoperability of the consoles and the BSS Soundweb London components was an especially crucial—and practical—aspect of this installation considering the aggressive time line for the retrofit. “We only had a three-week window to remove the old gear, change all the system programming, [and] pull all-new fiber optic cable between locations,” Fuqua says. “That included taking delivery of, installing and fully programming a large Studer mixing system.”
The process was started with Studer engineers in early March 2012 to prepare for the installation, beginning May 25th, to complete the project by June 15th—a very tight time line for a sizable Studer system to be built, tested and shipped to the site. The team took delivery of the first Vista 9 on June 1st and the second on June 4th.
PCC technicians were familiar with BSS Soundweb, making it a logical choice for signal processing. “We had previous experience with BSS Soundweb in Crowne Centre and also in the Sports Center on the PCC campus,” says Moses. “It seemed the best choice to replace and upgrade the signal processing and distribution with the latest from BSS.”
The college added nine BSS Soundweb London BLU-160 signal processors with digital audio bus and five BLU-BIB break-out box input expanders. This single rack unit provides many processing and logic objects with a drag-and-drop method of configuration. Four card slots accommodate a wide range of analog and digital inputs and outputs.
The notable variety of signal processing options provided by the BLU-160 signal processing units enabled the installation team to precisely optimize the sound and performance of the system. “The fact that the Studer and BSS components are literally made for each other was a tremendous advantage in ensuring we did not go over our deadline,” Fuqua adds. One advantage in the set-up was the use of the HiQnet London Architect programming interface. Its drag-and-drop functionality streamlined the configuration process. All Pro Sound's lead systems designer, Dennis Ryan, was able to create a custom GUI (graphical user interface) for complete functional control and monitoring for all types of events held in the Crowne Centre.
To provide connectivity, eight Allied Telesyn SC media fiber optic transceivers and 1,000 feet of Corning multi-mode 12-strand fiber-optic riser cable were utilized along with two Cisco Catalyst 2960 gigabit Ethernet switches. For the production staff, two ClearCom Tempest 2.4 GHz Wireless two-channel intercom systems were added to complete the installation.
Makeover complete
The Crowne Centre staff is extremely pleased with all aspects of the upgrade. “We are impressed with the sonic clarity of the Studer consoles and the flexibility they afford us in signal routing and sharing of inputs,” says Moses, who recognizes the advantages of control surfaces that are intuitive and easy to customize. “The top quality microphone preamps sound great, and the overall noise floor of the system is greatly improved over our previous components.” The college also likes how easy the BSS Sound Web Blue-160 system is to operate with the All Pro Sound design teams' custom-designed GUI control pages.
“We are very pleased with the replacement and improvements to the Crowne Centre audio system,” reflects Moses. “The All Pro Sound team did a great job putting this system together in a short time and back into operation on our tight schedule, for which we are thankful.”
