Below is a description of how Fort Bragg Seventh-day Adventist Church went from a system with some components dating back 30 years to a new easier-to-use and highly capable and integrated AV system.
Last week we ended with the sound system being installed and functional by the end of week 1. On Sunday I decided to move across the building to the fellowship hall where we planned to install a 70-volt in-ceiling speaker system, a 50″ LED TV on the wall, and the remnants of the Sanctuary sound system would be re-purposed to drive the new small AV system.
I began by selecting where my speakers and subwoofers would go in the ceiling to allow for consistent coverage where the highest concentration of people would be seated. Then the cutting the ceiling tiles and mounting the speakers and wiring them took over. We worked in conjunction with the electrician to run cables down the wall to the sound equipment in a surface-mount cable channel. He chose to run a separate channel for his electrical cable as he could not find a way to run his cable inside the wall. Once again, the construction of the building reared its head to make things difficult.
Once all the cables were run, it was time to make the connections and test. I connected a DVD player and ran an audio CD to test the speakers. They sounded amazing! We installed EV EVID series speakers (4 x 8.2″ and 2 x 10.1″ subs) for a roughly 40’x80′ space and the coverage wasn’t perfect but the sound quality was such that you could clearly hear the full audio spectrum and the subs really rounded out the low end nicely without being too punchy. The linoleum floor acted as both a diffuser and a bounce source to allow the sound to not be too loud but it bounced the sound to the areas of the room that would otherwise have been dead spots.
With that finished, the task was to mount the 50″ TV. I had used my stud finder to locate a stud and drilled the holes using the template that came with the wall-mount. We got the TV mounted pretty quickly and were working on connecting cables and moving it around when the entire mount pulled out of the wall! There was no stud behind the wall after all and the decision was made to postpone mounting the TV until a 3/4″ piece of plywood could be mounted to the studs and then the TV mount would be mounted to the plywood, something we didn’t have time to accomplish in the limited amount of time I had left the 2nd week.
We chose to move back to the Sanctuary and finish the video switcher installation and configuration. To this point, everything had been connected but untested on the video side and it was quite a surprise to learn that the scaler would not pass HDMI content to the VGA output, which messed up my nice little theory of how the system would be connected. I decided to use an HDMI balun to run content to the projector through a 1:4 HDMI splitter, and run an HDMI line from the splitter into the video switcher to allow computer content to be a source on the switcher. Of course, now the projector would not allow 720p or 1080i/p signals to display without a green tint. And I didn’t have time to go find or have access to a 100′ RGBHV cable to try that solution. When we finally sat down to discuss the options, it was decided that we didn’t need the troublesome ATEM Television Studio and would figure out a way to provide video switching via software at another time.
With the ATEM TVS uninstalled and the scaler and computers connected, I proceeded to train the operator on the fundamentals of the audio mixer and switching between sources on the scaler.
Now that I’ve had a bit of time to process all the things that went wrong, the obstacles that sprang up, and the in-the-field workarounds I attempted, it’s clear that church tech must be a very fluid environment. You should not get too married to a plan because if you can’t think of other ways to accomplish the task, it won’t get done. My plan was fairly solid in theory, but when faced with reality, some pieces just did not work as I thought they should. Other times the equipment had to conform to certain restrictions placed on it by third-parties (in the case of the scaler, HDCP must be conformed to when utilizing HDMI, which means no other outputs can be active for HDMI inputs than the HDMI output). Cables not functioning is a hazard of pulling cable long distances, but we ended up doing a surface run solution that is low-impact and low-visibility in a fraction of the time it took to pull cable underneath the church.
Finally, I think having a student mentality is a prerequisite for working in church tech. If you are not open to learning and think you know it all, then you will fall and fall hard. I consider myself knowledgeable in technical systems and how they interconnect and work. What I have realized is that the theory behind integrated systems and the practical reality is quite different and it’s only through experience in the front line trenches where you’re trying to make things systems work together that you gain that experience to know what will and will not work. Couple that with an industry with products that are constantly changing and you have a situation that becomes increasingly difficult and complex.
Know what you don’t know and surround yourself with people who do know what you do not and you will find success.
How about you? What are some installation nightmares and experiences you have had?
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