The county seat of Union County, Blairsville is nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia. It is also the home of Union County High School’s new performing arts center, which features Renkus-Heinz VARIAi modular loudspeaker arrays.
“The entire building is new,” says Frank Campo, Jr., VP of electrical engineering at Southern A&E of Austell, Ga., the full-service architecture and engineering firm behind the building and the sound system. “The auditorium is a multi-purpose space, used for assemblies, movies, concerts, and even a local church’s services on weekends. It seats 985, all on one level, with no balcony, sloping toward the front and raked toward the back. The room is 115ft. deep and about 75ft. wide, so it’s relatively narrow. The side walls are somewhat parallel but acoustical panels help a lot.”
Southern A&E chose four VARIAi arrays, with a VAX101i-7 on top, two VAX101i-15s in the middle, and a VAX101i-22 on the bottom, equipped with the unique VARIAi 90-to-120-degree transitional waveguide and configured as a horizontal center cluster. This enabled them to customize the pattern for each coverage area.
“In the center array, the top cabinet has a 60 degree horizontal pattern, the next box down has a transitional 60 to 90 degree waveguide, the third box has a 90 to 120 waveguide, and the bottom cabinet in the array has 120 degrees of horizontal coverage,” explains Brian Phillips, founder and CEO of Greer, S.C., theatrical systems integrator Productions Unlimited, which installed the system. “It was good to have those transitional waveguides as the intermediaries between the top and bottom boxes.”
The center cluster is flown above the front of the stage and it covers the middle of the seating sections and the rear. Renkus-Heinz PNX121 two-way Complex Conic loudspeakers, flown on the far left and right, cover the first 25 percent of the front.
Four Renkus-Heinz TRX61 two-way Complex Conic loudspeakers, mounted in the stage lip, provide coverage to the front rows.
Sub-bass is handled by a pair of Renkus-Heinz DRS18-1B direct-radiating subwoofers, hung to the left and right of the center cluster to account for the relative narrowness of the room.
Lab.gruppen amplifiers power all the speakers. Biamp Tesira DSP handles speaker processing, and everything is tied into a Crestron automation system.