New Building Up and Running!

It truly is a great feeling when the time comes for the first event for one of our customers after an install. It is the culmination of weeks, months, and sometimes even years of planning and work; not just for Lambda, but for the group themselves. 

Cross and Crown Church has worked with us for many years now and has been faithfully planning, saving, and dreaming about what this day might look like. On January 1st, 2023, we got to see that vision come to life. A well finished project is what we got to see for Cross and Crown (C&C). It is our firm belief that technology should not distract and should instead contribute to upholding the primary mission of the organization and its events. With C&C we got to see some serious fun and excitement as the church settled in to their first Sunday and look forward to future day to day events. Let’s look at how this build came together and how it fit C&C and their vision for the future. 

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In building C&C design, technology selection was a key piece. The church had communicated a desire for new systems and flexibility but did not want a system that felt overbearing and in need of skilled operators or one that was over the top in look and feel. They didn’t want a system that would take over the look of the church but blended with them. In each request, we were careful to select technology that would uphold these goals. 

For the audio side of the design, we focused first on speaker coverage. The church had previously struggled with acoustic issues in their old space, so we went all out in the new space. Working with Danley Sound Labs designer Kim, and our lead audio engineer Trevor Fisk, a system was designed composed of 2 “rings” of speakers. This allowed coverage to evenly extend by using a front ring of speakers and rear ring of speakers with programmed delays. Subwoofers were flown near the center of the room and allowed for seamless, full coverage with high intelligibility. The use of point-source style speakers allowed us to put coverage exactly where we needed it and keep it off hard wall surfaces. 

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When it came to controlling the audio system and mixing, we went with a favorite Allen & Heath SQ console with a ME-1 in-ear system. Allen & Heath does a great job of allowing flexibility and fun but doing it in a way that feels easy to navigate and control. The ME-1 in-ear system has excellent sonic quality as well as dynamic channel names. It can have up to 48 local inputs configurable for each user.  The SQ-6 console isn’t the biggest one out there, but it’s a jump up from their previous M32 console in features without being intimidating. It is, still a month later, the piece C&C enjoys the most!

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Video systems were a fun element on this install!! Straightaway, C&C was interested in a curved LED wall for a display surface. LED wall technology allows so much flexibility and it’s refreshing to have a customer want to do something creative with it to help the room come together. The room in question is a large corner-oriented space. It had several challenges with a low ceiling, a high stage, and some support poles. We designed a 4:1 wide aspect ratio wall allowing high visibility across the room, a shorter overall height, and an amazing design feature for the room. C&C went for a modern but minimalistic look and though LED wall technology can stand out this design really blends in well and adds not only to the look of the space but also its usefulness.  The cameras for the room are a custom-built Lambda design involving Panasonic BGH1 Box cameras with lenses. These were mounted on Ronin moving heads. This combo pushes camera quality in remotely operated cameras to the max, allows for smooth movement, and is a small profile mounted in the room to avoid view obstructions and allow for more seating.​

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The lighting element for C&C auditorium is simple with no moving heads or haze, but still loads of design and fun. Fixtures from Zebra Productions lighting the stage allow an all-LED front wash with colored backlight and top light to accent the band and natural wood wall. House lights around the room were from ChromaQ, inspire XT models, and allow fine individual control of every single light in the room, not just for brightness, but also color.  The entire lighting infrastructure is based on a streaming ACN backbone with lots of easy growth room and control. The backbone includes streaming ACN wall panels for setting quick looks in the room without powering up the lighting console making it easy to use in the room.​

As fun as the main room may be, the lobby, common room, and upstairs great hall, and classrooms have tuns of functionality built in as well. The upstairs great hall rooms are based around 5 combinable rooms each with similar tech. Each room includes 2 mics, a Bluetooth receiver, an HDMI receiver, a TV, ceiling speakers, and a wall control.  Any single room can act as a teaching classroom space, or all the rooms can be combined into one. The lobby and commons spaces act as additional aux gathering spaces with the same capability. ​

We loved how this new building turned out from design to installation and now are so excited to see the space in use! Building a large AV system is no easy task. It takes careful coordination, communication of needs, attention to detail, a great install team, and a great customer willing to communicate their goals and trust us to execute them. Check out our social media pages to see many of the individual pieces in action or drop our team a note if you are curious about how to execute some of these ideas in your space.

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