Hello all,
We have built ourselves a nice big lecture theatre at work and want to put a decent surround sound system in it.
The room is approximately 15m square with a ceiling height of 2.4m and will seat about 150 people, most of the walls are covered by curtains.
Do any of you out there have any ideas on what amplifier and speakers we could use to give us some big cinema sound without breaking the bank? (I reckon we'll be looking at upto £10k)
The room will be used for doing things like powerpoint presentations as well as showing movies and we'll need to be able to have a microphone available at all times so a mixer / or pre-amp may be required for that.
I need something that will impress all who hear it!
Thank you,
Mark
Hi Mark,
You will need to supply much more information about this room and its present use and equipage if people here are to have any sort of a hope of making useful suggestions.
I have had charge of Lecture Theaters, Class Rooms, TV Studios, and - only once Thank Gaud ! -a Real Theater that had a stage and banked seating .... as well as more hazards to public safety than you would believe possible. All of my charges were in peculiar spaces and all of them had been equipped at modest budgets ... moreover Politics always crept in with the budgeting.
Nothings Ever easy but you can make your problem a little more straightforward by posting photos and diagrams of the your room as well as going into more detail about its equipage.
For instance, the seating - is it fixed tilt up cinema/theater type seating or just chairs?
How is the room laid out - where are the entrances and exits .. thats a fair sized audience and you must be aware that there are all sorts of public safety regulations for that kind of facility.
You mention curtained walls? I've only ever used those as backdrops in simple TV studios and in a presentation venue they may well be more of a liability than an advantage.
You haven't mentioned the Video/TV equipment that the sound gear is to be used with. Will you be using Video Projection onto a fixed or a drop down projection screen?
Is your control and amplification equipment to go into the room or will it be in a control room outside of that room? Will all of the equipment be operated by the presenter and/or presentation team or by a technician?
You say ...
" The room is approximately
15m square with a ceiling height of 2.4m and will seat
about 150 people, most of the walls are covered by curtains. "
More or less than 150 people ? And how many people in the presentation team? Is this a total of
less than 200 people in that room?
Where does the audience enter the room? Where is the Emergency Exit?
Have a think about it, do some properly scaled diagrams with measurements as well as few photos- if you haven't done them already - and then post them here and people will be able to give you much better informed opinions. Not necessarily me since I have avoided all professional work for several years now, but you have had some useful .. though slightly frustrated
.. responses already.
There are specialists who deal with this sort of situation of course. See hotelmanagement-network
Still, don't despair ... I once equipped an entire hotel - in which an organization that I was involved with was staging an arts convention - with speakers and power amps intended for domestic use that I borrowed from a Sponsoring Loud Speaker Company. The company also provided the Technical staff to set it up and those technicians wired the audio equipment with high grade domestic speaker cable ... over 2000 potential speaker cable pilferers were at that event!
Its amazing what you can do with equipment that is nominally intended for domestic use, always provided that the equipment is aimed toward the higher end of the market and then set up properly.
I just hope that you
have as a first principle given thought to public safety since this sort of venue can be Bloody Dangerous if it isn't properly laid out and managed, and IF anything goes wrong ...
The People In Charge will be looking for someone to blame and
You Have Requested Help on a Public Forum.... talk about painting a target on your own back
I wish you luck,
Arnold.