Fitton Center For Creative Arts

 

Located at 101 S Monument St, Hamilton, Ohio 45011, the Fitton Center serves the community with a variety of community events including theatre, musical performance, instructional classes and more. the facility includes a very nice performance space where we recently installed a new sound system. Following is a description of the pproject. To visit the web site, click on the picture above.

 

The seating is configured in three basic sections. Shown here is the center section.

 

Shown here is the right section.

 

Shown here is the left section. During the construction phase considerable discussion was held rearding the acoustics of the space. There were two major concerns the first of which was the extended RT60 in the space and the second was the issue of the sound from a nearby railroad encroaching into the space. A number of measures were taken by the contractor to seal up the space from sound travel into the room from the outside and with the exception of basic low end vibrations that travel through the structure, the train sound was considerably reduced.

The RT60 reverberation was was a little more complex in that there were already acoustic panels installed on the walls and there was also a desire to not make the room an anechoeic space in an effort to maintain as much natural sound in the room as possible but to still maintain intelligability for the listeners. The entire wall across the back of the stage area was covered with drapery so the only surface with no treatment was the ceiling area. It was decided that a thick layer of fiberous insulation should be sprayed to the ceiling which would help with both the outdoor sounds and eliminate reflections off of the metal surface for the interior. This solution worked very well leaving a room that offered intelligable spoken word and suffecient reflections to provide a great music listening environment.

 

A high quality Renkus-Heinz Four cabinet cluster was installed to provide even coverage to all seats in the room. The resultant design and installation made for the most acoustically flat room I have encountered with a very minimal amount of equalization required, a characteristic greatly to be desired.

 

The main speaker cluster, sub-woofers and monitor channels were all powered by Crown amplifiers installed in a rack located in the backstage area. A dbx speaker processor was installed to provide system equalization and other processing as needed.

 

A Soundcraft Si series digital console was installed for both the front of house and monitor mixing. iPad interface allows the engineer to mix from any locatio nin the room.

 

A small rack was provided to house the included Sennheiser wireless mics, DVD player and FSR power conditioner and sequencer.

 

In addition to fixed mic and monitor jacks located in the stage floor, a Soundcraft digital stagebox was provided that can be located anywhere on the stage as needed.

 

There was a level of uncertainity about exactly which monitor mixes would be best at which locations. It was decided that rather than put a monitor jack for each mix at each floor pocket we would install a patch bank allowing changes in the monitor system wiring configuration to be done easily.

 

The sub-woofers were left to be portable so that they could be positioned wherever was most convenient for any given event. Floor wedge monitors were supplied as well.