With the help of Wharfedale and Chauvet, Schoonspruit SS has now moved to the big league of Arts and Culture, and VisualSound is honoured to be a part of this ongoing big step of theirs.

 

Schoonspruit Senior Secondary School, in Malmesbury, Western Cape, is a school that places Arts & Culture highly on their priority list. They have been chosen by the SA Government to focus extensively on this important part of education. As a result of this, they have big concerts every year, where they hire sound and lighting equipment and engineers.

The school approached VisualSound for a sound and lighting installation which would carry the load of these concerts. VisualSound accepted the challenge, and this article tells us more about the installation and products that was used.

Schoonspruit’s requirements:
1. Sound System, capable of handling concerts, dances, and school gatherings.
2. System must be secure so as to avoid theft.
3. The basics in lighting, which offers the ability to add lights, as the school’s needs become greater.

VisualSound’s Solution:
With the sound system, we decided to go with Wharfedale. This brand offers efficient, yet powerful performance across the board, and backed by many years in the industry, they were the obvious choice for this job.

The speakers that we decided on came from the powerful DLX series. The DLX 153 were used to reproduce the tops and mids, and the DLX 18B were used for the bass frequencies. We also used DLX 12M for the stage as the monitoring system.
There is no use in having these beautiful speakers, but nothing to power them with, so we installed three Wharfedale MP2800 amplifiers. We also installed the XO-204 2-way crossover, and Q-230 stereo equalizer. These two processors are essential to getting the best sound quality and balance out of this sound system.

Here are a few pictures of these components:

 

  

 

We used the Allen & Heath ZED 22 FX for the mixer. Allen & Heath is a top-class brand that has been used for the finest mixing applications for many years, which made them perfect for the job at hand. This mixer features 22 channels, of which 16 are mono XLR channels, onboard effects like reverbs and delays, and a USB port for recording and playing back to and from a computer.

The whole system will only be used for school dances and concerts. This means that there is no need to keep all the speakers installed permanently, hence decreasing the risk of theft. The system will be used once a week for the school hall gathering, but this will only require two of the DLX 153’s. These two will b

 e more than enough for speech and playing light music. We did a permanent installation of these two speakers, while the others were configured so they can effortlessly be packed away after every concert.

Some Pictures:

This picture shows the configuration of both the installed speakers, and the ‘put-away’ speakers. In the background we see the permanently installed DLX 513, and on the stage we see the DLX 153 positioned on top of the DLX 18B, with the DLX 12M monitors close by.