PINDALE, WYOMING: Nestled amid the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, Sublette County School District #1 serves the students of Pinedale, Wyoming and its neighboring communities. Total enrollment across all grades falls just over 1,000 students. With an auditorium available for school performances and community events, the Pinedale High School operates as one of the cultural cornerstones of the small community, and the responsibility of maintaining and operating it’s A/V system falls to Patrick Rookus, the district’s auditorium manager and tech director. When the room’s aging sound reinforcement system approached its thirtieth birthday, Rookus made the call to renovate it, both as a way to prevent imminent equipment failure and, perhaps more importantly, as a way to keep up with the needs of the auditorium’s diverse users. A Symetrix Jupiter 8 app based, turn-key DSP resides at the heart of the new system and delivers transparent audio quality, system flexibility, and intuitive user control.
“We wanted the new system to be versatile enough to satisfy the needs of the varied types of performances and presentations that take place, while also anticipating the sound system requirements for many years to come,” said Rookus. He contacted Performance Audio of nearby Salt Lake City, Utah, where system design & installation expert Jake Peery worked out an affordable and effective solution. “By using a Symetrix Jupiter, I knew we could create a system that would be simple, flexible, and – together with a Symetrix ARC-2e wall panel remote – easy to operate,” said Peery. “The Jupiter possesses all of the necessary processing power, including delays, limiting, and equalization, at a very affordable price point.”
The system is composed of eight new Sennheiser ew 114 G3 wireless microphones, along with a range of other existing wired and wireless microphones that feed an existing console. The outputs of the console feed two of the eight analog inputs of the Symetrix Jupiter 8. An additional microphone runs directly into the Jupiter 8 to allow speech reinforcement for simple applications. The additional inputs of the Jupiter 8 accommodate other “guest” consoles that can be utilized without having to un-patch the main console. On the back end, a new stereo Electro-Voice EVA line array with three top cabinets and two subwoofers per side provides impactful coverage, and four Electro-Voice XI-1082 loudspeakers provide front fill. Electro-Voice amplifiers power the system.
The Jupiter 8 runs the “Sound Reinforcement #6” app, which provides a high-pass filter, a low-pass filter, a 15-band EQ, a split compressor, and a feedback fighter on each input. On each of the outputs there is a speaker manager module, which contains eight bands of parametric EQ, a high-pass filter, a low-pass filter, and up to 243ms of speaker delay. A flexible matrix creates eight submixes, where any input can be routed to any output with full input level control. Peery installed a Symetrix ARC-2e wall panel remote at the rack, which allows Rookus to easily select between the Jupiter 8 inputs. Moreover, the ARC-2e allows for selecting different operating modes, such that the guest consoles can patch in and be processed as left/right only, as left/right and separate fills, or as left/right, fills, and subwoofers.
“It’s an efficient system that does everything required of it,” summarized Peery. “Moreover, it has sufficient flexibility to meet the school’s future needs.”
ABOUT SYMETRIX Symetrix engineers high-end professional audio solutions, specializing in DSP hardware and software. Symetrix products are distributed worldwide, and designed and manufactured in the U.S. at the Seattle area headquarters. Since 1976, customers have enjoyed the benefits of Symetrix’ independent ownership and management. For more information on Symetrix professional audio products, please visit www.symetrix.co or call +1 (425) 778-7728.
