Located in southern Indiana across the Ohio River from Louisville, Jeffersonville High School has a proud tradition of live theater. Over the years, the sound system in its traditional proscenium auditorium had degraded, making it difficult to do justice to modern productions. The school faced a classic refurbishing challenge, with lofty goals but a limited budget. SystemMax, a local design/build AVL firm, was brought in to address the issues. They recommended Electro-Voice loudspeakers from the start.
“The previous sound system had deteriorated to the point that the school was bringing in rental systems just to have an assembly,” says SystemMax co-owner Darryl Johnson. “Speech intelligibility was their most important prerequisite for the new system, along with higher output and low-frequency capacity to make an impact for events and live performances. And, because it’s a high school, durability and ease of use were also important. The Electro-Voice and Dynacord solution we specified meets all those criteria.”
Working in consultation with Electro-Voice, SystemMax designed a system using models from the EV-Innovation family of acoustically and aesthetically matched loudspeakers for fixed installation: twin arrays combining EVF (front-loaded) under EVH (horn-loaded) units, in a stereo configuration. The EVFs cover the front rows; the EVHs are time-aligned and aimed diagonally, ensuring coverage for the middle of the space while doubling long-throw coverage to the rear seats, with extended pattern control down to 500 Hz. Two flown EVF-2151D subwoofers supply the requested low-end punch. All the loudspeakers are mounted within the proscenium, making the sound system totally invisible from the audience.
The entire system is powered by eight amplifiers from Dynacord’s new C series. Designed to bring high-end professional amplifier performance to the small/mid-sized installation market, C series amps feature high-performance DSP with intuitive multi-device remote-control software, extremely robust power supplies, and sophisticated protection circuitry to ensure safe, reliable operation under all conditions. Advanced FIR-Drive, utilizing finite impulse response filters, is normally reserved for tour-grade DSPs; this premium C series feature optimizes original factory loudspeaker settings, yielding performance previously unheard of at this price point.
“We heard the new Dynacord amps at InfoComm and loved them – great all-around quality and great bang for the buck,” notes Max Maxwell, fellow co-owner of SystemMax. “Making the switch to Dynacord has saved the school a significant amount of money—which they used to fill other needs like wireless and intercoms—while providing the state-of-the-art in terms of features and performance.”
The system has helped Jeffersonville High School revitalize its performing arts center with outstanding clarity, power and durability. Beyond the excellent performance-to-price ratio offered by the hardware, Maxwell credits manufacturer technical support as being critical to the success of the installation.
“We call ourselves an integrator, but we’re really in the relationship business,” says Maxwell. “That’s why we do so much work with EV and Dynacord. They have products we can trust, and they support those products from system design through installation. They help us to get it right and make our clients happy, which is exactly what happened at Jeffersonville High. It’s really what this whole business is about.”