©2011 Nicolai Pop
CINCINNATI, OHIO – SEPTEMBER 2011: For over a century, God’s Bible School & College in Cincinnati, Ohio has been preparing young people for effective careers in the service of the church, both at home and overseas. A fully accredited college, GBSC offers its students a well-balanced curriculum together with all the social amenities of the larger colleges in the Buckeye State. Among its architectural gems is a beautiful 1,000-seat chapel housed within the Knapp Memorial Building, which, until recently, limped along with an underpowered and semi-functional sound reinforcement system. A new collection of Danley Sound Labs loudspeakers and subwoofers has breathed new life into the chapel – and at a very affordable price.
The musical portions of the services held by GBSC are best described as classical, infused with elements of southern gospel. Apart from the steady accrual of speaker failures in the old system, the school’s music department
found the system’s lack of input mixing flexibility to be an annoyance. GBSC’s new department chair also heard the old system’s lack of power, coverage and fidelity.
©2011 Courtesy of God’s Bible School and College
Audio consultant and engineer, Tim Dentler both designed the replacement sound reinforcement system and oversaw its installation. “The room is quite large, and the old system relied on a delay ring,” he explained. “Although they are sometimes needed, a delay ring system will always be sonically inferior to a single point system if the single point system can deliver the coverage. I had been following Danley’s innovative loudspeaker technologies for a while, and I saw an opportunity to use its very well-behaved designs to do away with the delay ring.”
Via its manufacturer’s representative, Avcom in Cleveland, Ohio, Danley arranged demos of potential solutions for GBSC. “The new molded horn design SM-60F was perfect,” said Dentler. “It sounded fantastic, had the right coverage pattern, coupled well, and came with a surprisingly small price tag.” Despite a very “weathery” spring and summer at its headquarters in Georgia, Danley Sound Labs succeeded in delivering the boxes to GBSC on a very tight time schedule. “I was impressed with Danley’s obvious commitment to me as an integrator,” said Dentler. “They worked with me and had an obvious appreciation for the stresses and demands of a contractor.” At the end of August, the school completed the installation of three Danley SM-60Fs in a single flown cluster, with two Danley TH-MINI subwoofers tucked into an enclosure under the stage.
Dentler has a long history with Ashly Audio products, and he specified a 3-in by 6-out Ashly Protea 3.24CL processor to handle all input conditioning, routing, and speaker management. Four two-channel Ashly KLR 3200s had the Danley SM-60Fs and TH-MINIs sounding fantastic.”
A Yamaha LS9-32 with a sixteen-channel expander dramatically increased GBSC’s input count to forty-eight. Reports from the congregation, as well as from the new department chair, are glowing. “Over and over, people keep expressing their amazement that so much sound emanates from the three boxes above the stage,” said Dentler. “Of course, we explain that there are subwoofers as well, but that doesn’t diminish the effect. The former dead spots are now happily filled with music. Congregants can hear and understand no matter where they sit.”
ABOUT DANLEY SOUND LABS Danley Sound Labs is the exclusive home of Tom Danley, one of the most innovative loudspeaker designers in the industry today and recognized worldwide as a pioneer for “outside the box” thinking in professional audio technology. www.danleysoundlabs.com
