Bringing Usability to A School's Most Used Room

A local D20 Elementary school approached us at the beginning of summer looking for a solution to improve their gym speaker system for the coming school year. At this point, nothing had failed yet, but the system was getting very old and was not well designed for how they now use the gym space. The gym, for the school, is where they hold assemblies, do theater productions, as well as have their normal PE/gym classes throughout the week. It was in desperate need of a redesign so the system could meet these needs.

The old system was simply four speakers hung in a center cluster in the middle of the gym. They were almost pointed at the floor and were supported by an old analog soundboard mounted in a rack. This created a lot of issues with intelligibility from the feedback and usability, especially for theatre productions with multiple microphones and feedback.​

We approached this system focusing on improving speech quality during theatre productions and assemblies while still providing great full gym coverage for other activities held in the gym. To accomplish this goal, we choose the Danley OS12CX. This is a speaker designed for outdoor application which is something we love for gym installations. Why would we love outdoor speakers for a gym?? The casing on the speaker is designed to withstand extreme outdoor elements, so it makes sense that it will also hold up great against basketballs and anything else “thrown” at it!! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun there.)​

We positioned the speakers on either side of the stage facing out into the gym to help clean up the sound bouncing off the gym floor. This positioning also eliminates the amount of feedback problems that are created anytime you put a microphone in front of a speaker. So, now any announcements or performers from the stage area can now be heard more clearly without any extra noise.

Overall, this upgrade is going to make a huge difference in the room and for the teachers, students and parents. We were excited to partner with this school to help them keep improving experiences for their students!