We're Moving!
Conference Technologies Inc.® is proud to announce the opening of our new facility in Omaha, NE.
Conference Technologies Inc.® has grown so rapidly that we have outgrown our current Omaha facility. We are moving into a larger facility that will allow us to continue to provide the best Audio/Visual Sales and services to the Nebraska area.
Beginning November 1st, 2007 you can find us at our new location:
11205 South 150th St.
Suite 500
Omaha, NE 68138
402-593-6750
www.conferencetech.com
Click here for other Conference Technologies Inc.® Locations
WIN A SMARTBOARD SB680 FOR YOUR CLASSROOM!
There’s no catch. We simply want to hear from you and find out if there’s anything we can do for you. Tell us how we can help –or not– and we’ll enter you in our October drawing for a SmartBoard SB680 and floor stand.
The SMART Board 600 series interactive whiteboard lets you do more than ever before. Combining the same great features that people love with new expandability options, it's limited only by your imagination. Interact with its large display screen to make dynamic presentations, meetings and classroom sessions easy. All it takes to focus attention, engage your audience and strengthen your message is the touch of a finger.
To enter the contest click here to send us an email.
For official rules go here.
Digital mixing consoles drive dramatic improvements
in corporate and house of worship sound
Problem: Controlling and enhancing the quality of sound anywhere you need a large number of microphones or line inputs.
Solution: Advances in digital technology have greatly enhanced the power of multi-channel mixing consoles and, in the last year or so, made them affordable. Expert setup from companies like Conference Technologies, Inc.®, together with the consoles’ ability to save a very large number of settings, have made them practical for users without advanced audio skills.
The reason to use a mixing console
A big mixing console gives a sound engineer the ability to mix multiple voices, instruments, and audio sources and adjust and filter the quality of the sound on a wide variety of parameters.
In a concert hall or recording studio, you would use a console to mix and adjust every input. Each voice and instrument would normally be miked, filtered and adjusted separately. The engineer would then adjust the volume level for each channel and output a final mix to the recording or PA system.
In a house of worship, you would use a console to mix and tune the sound of the choir, praise band or orchestra coming in to the system through various microphones. You would also adjust the timbre of the pastor’s voice and the audio quality from videos and computer presentations.
In a corporate auditorium or a large boardroom, you would use a console to mix and adjust the sound from the microphones of presenters, managers, board or panel members, bring in far end audio from an audio or videoconferencing system, and mix and adjust audio from a video, DVD or computer presentation.
One of the biggest drawbacks to older analog and digital consoles is their price. In a concert hall or recording studio, it is not unusual to pay $100,000 or more for the console alone. It is possible to buy a basic analog board for roughly $15,000, but these units normally require specific expertise from users and, if there is to be any expansion of the basic mixing function, a large investment in equalizers, filters and other add-on components.
A new generation of digital products combines all of this technology into one box – and makes it possible to buy and set up a very professional piece of gear for under $20,000.
Digital functionality
The key to the new digital consoles is that they combine mixing capabilities with digital signal processing (DSP). An analog board is a mixer only.
“Almost every digital console now includes compressor/limiter, parametric equalization, and gate functionality, plus multi-function inputs and outputs and one or more expansion slots,” explains Conference Technologies’ Matt McNeil. “If you need a compressor, for example, there’s no need to add a device–you just flip a software switch.”
A digital console will not only reduce the need for add-on equipment, but it allows organizations with limited audio expertise to achieve very professional results.
“We will typically program anywhere from 10 to 50 presets when we set up a digital console,” says McNeil. “For example, we might tweak out a pastor’s voice on a particular microphone and then save the settings at a preset called ‘pastor preaching mic.’ Now any sound guy can come in there, experienced or not, recall that mic setting and make the pastor sound just great.” Better still, he can tweak that setting if he knows how and save it again, but then always revert back if he gets in trouble.
“Say a church choir director is working on a Christmas pageant,” adds McNeil. “He can set up the mics and sound board at a Saturday practice, save his settings, revert back to the worship setup for Sunday, then pick up where he left off at the next practice.” How many presets CTI programs depends on the user’s expertise and budget. Some churches and corporate customers are able to do all their own setups; others with less expertise may spend a little more money up front and have CTI do them.
As a company, Conference Technologies has some unique talent in its engineering department –including one technician who spent 15 years on the road touring with the Byrds. “It’s not a trivial thing to make a kick drum sound good,” explains McNeil. “We may have a customer frustrated trying to tune the sound of a praise band or orchestra. Our guy will come in, turn a few knobs, and there’s your kick drum, there’s your guitar, there’s your vocalists. We understand the technology at a very fundamental level. Our customers can benefit from our expertise for years to come simply by recalling our setups on their consoles.”
Digital consoles in houses of worship
McNeil describes Conference Technologies’ use of digital consoles in two house of worship projects currently under way.
In one, a very large Evangelical Christian church in St. Louis, CTI is implementing a design incorporating a Yamaha M7CL 48-channel board.
“We’re avoiding the need to buy literally racks of processors, compressors, limiters, gates and more, because all of that functionality is built into the mixer,” says McNeil. “In this case, we’ll be setting up at least 50 microphone presets as we tweak out drum mics and guitars, vocal mics, preaching mics, and so on. The church is relatively limited in their audio skill sets, but they’re growing rapidly and they have a large and active music program.”
One of the nice features of this particular sound system is the use of Aviom mixers and headsets instead of floor wedges to allow band members to monitor their own sound. “Aviom sells a card that fits into a Yamaha expansion slot,” explains McNeil. “Normally in rehearsal the musicians may call out ‘I need a little more snare’ or ‘I can’t hear the guitar’ and the engineer adjusts the monitor mix. But here each musician can reach down and adjust his own mix, giving a better result and allowing less-experienced engineers to stage the event.”
In the second church, CTI installed a very inexpensive console (less than $5,000), but one that still provides 32 analog inputs and “racks and racks” of processing functionality. This church has more expertise and a smaller budget, but we still set up several key microphones to ensure high-quality results.
Digital consoles in a corporate setting
In a corporate setting, the advantage of using a digital console is in efficiency and speed, rather than music quality. “These guys don’t want to be rolling out a Grateful Dead show,” says McNeil. “They want something quick, simple and reliable.”
We’ve recently completed a sound system for a Fortune 500 company in St. Louis that includes a Mackie TT24 24-channel digital console. The strength of this system is that it’s very flexible. The AV staff can set up large numbers of microphones, process their signals in various ways and rely on the built-in DSP to simplify the setup.
“The power of this system is twofold,” McNeil explains. “First, no one ever has to sit and stare at the board, wondering why something doesn’t sound right. Has someone moved a couple of the inputs? No, when you recall a preset, even a setup of the whole system, you know you’re going back to where you want to be.
“Second, when you’re doing something you’ve never done before, it helps you with a whole range of shortcuts. If you’re adding, say, five more microphones than you’ve ever used before, you can still use the settings you’ve saved for that type of mic and apply them in seconds. And then, too, if you realize you need to add a limiter or an echo canceller or any other type of gear, you don’t need to run around, grabbing cables and components, running this here, running that there. You do your work in the digital realm as opposed to the physical realm.”
Simplicity, expandability, and cost savings are all advantages of the new digital consoles. If this is something you need in your auditorium, boardroom, theater or house of worship, we’d like to help.
Digital ‘snake’ technology extends the power of a digital console
In a performance sound system, the “snake” or audio bus carries the signals from the stage box, where microphones plug in, to the console. Traditional analog snakes are expensive, bulky, and take a lot of time and space to install.
“Think about it,” explains Matt McNeil of Conference Technologies, Inc. “If you’re running a bundle of 16 to 48 copper cables, that starts to be a lot of wire. Depending on the length and number of channels, an analog snake will cost $1,000 and up.” Add the cost of labor to pull all that cable and the price goes higher still.
New digital snake technology eliminates the bulk and most of the cost by carrying the same signals on a standard Cat5 network cable. “It’s cheap cable, but it’s reliable and you can run a really long distance,” says McNeil. Better still, it helps you avoid the need to convert back and forth from the analog to digital realm.
In any application, staying digital eliminates the noise, degradation and high frequency losses inevitable with long analog cable runs. It also eliminates the hums and buzzes caused by faulty electrical grounds and allows you to split inputs without the need for bulky and expensive isolation transformers.
“We will be working on installations soon,” says McNeil, “where there are no analog cables beyond the point where you plug your microphones into the input box. There’s a new Renkus-Heinz speaker (and more coming from other makers) that’s CobraNet enabled. We’ll digitize the signal, process it, tune it and then, at the last second, convert it back to analog in the speakers themselves.”
In portable situations, staying digital simplifies setups and helps them go faster. “We even stock SJO Cat5 cable, so it’s rubber coated like a microphone cable,” McNeil explains. “It’s durable, flat and coils up easily. It sits nicely on a stage.” And when it’s time to plug into your console, you only have one connection to make.
The advantages of the technology are clear. We’d love to help you put it to work in your next sound system.
WIN A SMARTBOARD SB680 FOR YOUR CLASSROOM!
There’s no catch. We simply want to hear from you and find out if there’s anything we can do for you. Tell us how we can help –or not– and we’ll enter you in our October drawing for a SmartBoard SB680 and floor stand.
The SMART Board 600 series interactive whiteboard lets you do more than ever before. Combining the same great features that people love with new expandability options, it's limited only by your imagination. Interact with its large display screen to make dynamic presentations, meetings and classroom sessions easy. All it takes to focus attention, engage your audience and strengthen your message is the touch of a finger.
To enter the contest click here to send us an email.
For official rules go here.
Conference Technologies Inc.® ~ Creating A Vision For Technology