A close-up of the speaker cluster


A robotic pan-tilt-zoom
video camera

Episcopal High School Callaway Chapel
Alexandria, VA

This project consisted of an Audiovisual system that needed to be both easy to operate and flexible.

The heart of the system is a two way control system that switches between an audio mixing board in the balcony and an auto-mixer that requires no operator. The system is capable of video and audio recording, and will eventually be able to broadcast the service to other parts of the church.

The loudspeakers were carefully chosen and aimed, since the chapel was unusually reverberant. Speakers with tight pattern control had to be used- this means that theywere designed to keep sound from radiating into unoccupied parts of the room. When speech 'bounces off the walls' too much, it creates echoes, which in turn make the speech more difficult to understand. The challenge of designing a church sound reinforcement system lies in balancing the natural reverberance of the room (which is needed for music), and speech intelligibility.