St Anne of Few Cables
The Church of St Anne in Aigburth, Liverpool dates back to 1837 and is a National Heritage Grade II Listed building. Built to offer Christian worship for the occupants of the 'large houses' built at the time in the area, as well as local farm-workers, St Anne's congregation grew quickly and additions to the building followed in 1853 and 1913. Still a growing church, St Anne's sits at the heart of its community offering not only a contemporary place of worship but also a space for a wide range of activities and musical performances. Modern day churches are often multi-purpose venues that require the best in AV provision - where new-builds can take this into account during the design process, listed Victorian buildings regularly present all manner of interesting challenges.
"St Anne's now has a first-class AV system that offers a high degree of flexibility without having a detrimental impact of the interior of this listed building."
Bringing St Anne's Into The Modern Age
St Anne's wanted to modernise its AV facilities with a system that could be used to present slides for notes, hymn lyrics and visual content to accompany sermons but that could also offer video facilities in presentations and assemblies. Multiple displays were to be installed to enable projection from multiple sources, including widescreen laptop and video recorder with cameras. Strict regulation surrounding the building's listed status meant that the installation had to be as inconspicuous as possible with minimal physical impact on the fabric of the interior.
POLAR recommended the installation of AD-Systems speakers throughout, chosen for their acoustic performance, numerous mounting options and pleasing aesthetic, a Wyrestorm solution to enable all required signals to be transmitted and routed to the displays with minimal cabling and a Mackie iPad-controlled audio mixer to complete the comprehensive AV scheme which preserved the integrity of the church.
Hidden In Plain Sight
2x AD-Systems i.Flex 10, 2x i.Flex 8 and a further 2x i.Flex 6 speakers were situated throughout the building for optimum coverage. The speakers were powered by MC² T1500 and T1000 amplifiers, delivering clean sound alongside ultra-reliable performance. A Wyrestorm SW-0501-HDBaseT presentation switcher and scaler was used in conjunction with 5x Wyrestorm AMP-001-010 HDBase Receivers/Digital Amplifiers, enabling all required signals to be transmitted up to 70m using a single Cat5 cable to connect each amplifier via its transmission-repeating function. The audio output capabilities of the amplifiers also allowed audio to routed over the Cat5 from the video location, to be extracted at the amplifier nearest the Mackie DL32R iPad-controlled audio mixer.
Discretion Guaranteed With Minimal Impact
Dan Orange of Electric Orange:
"Installing AV systems into listed buildings always presents challenges beyond the norm and in a church, it's especially important to achieve discretion and keep the impact to a minimum. The i.Flex speakers offered great sound and gave me options to mount them in a way most sympathetic to the interior. Their flexibility allowed me to 'hide' them in plain sight on the church's beams. The Wyrestorm system reduced what could have effectively been a matrix with multiple cable runs, to a single Cat5 cable, daisy chaining both video and audio signals. Using a single Cat5 cable was also a huge bonus in terms of the of the projector and main screen, which were mounted 8m above the floor. As a result, what could have been a real mission was made into a straightforward, great value and very tidy install."
