092 VENUE
BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY Founded in 1863, Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) is a nationally recognised urban history centre dedicated to preserving and encouraging the study of Brooklyn’s 400-year history. Located in Brooklyn Heights, housed in a magnificent landmark building designed by George Post and opened in 1881, today’s BHS is a cultural hub for civic dialogue, thoughtful engagement and community outreach. When Peter Starr of Starr Entertainment Group was looking for his next big project, the restoration of one of BHS’ gallery rooms really stood out to him as something different that he could get stuck into, as he explained to mondo*dr: “We always keep an eye out for interesting projects and when we heard about BHS it really stood out to us so we approached them about it.” BHS knew what it wanted from the beginning - a high performance audiovisual system with a lot of flexibility and simple, fool-proof operation. It is a truly multipurpose room that will be used for artists, lecturers, musicians and so on. “While this made it a challenging project from a budget perspective, it also made it really enjoyable because we had to figure out how to get everything to work together while being very user-friendly,” said Peter. “For such a complex installation such as this, we automated almost everything and translated all the venue’s needs into technical terms using a Crestron touchscreen control panel system for the front-end - four control panels in total.” For a room that will have a multitude of uses it was important that the audio brands chosen were capable of almost anything yet were hard wearing, which is why Peter turned to a JBL and EAW to supply the loudspeaker and bass units powered by Ashly amplifiers. “All the lines we chose are core brands that we’ve been working with for a long time, we know them and trust them,” he said. “We have strong relationships with the brands and feel they do the best job for the requirements of the projects we work on. When strict budgets are
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also a consideration it is good to work with lines such as JBL that are wide enough to offer all sorts of different options.” As a restoration project, Peter and his team worked very closely with Thomas Ryan, the architect in charge and because the building itself is so historic and architecturally stunning, Peter and his team had to be very careful in their design, so as to not damage or spoil the columns, wood or soffits. “Everyone was working within the constraints of the building,” said Peter, “We had to really think about where we placed the loudspeakers, which are 22ft in the air and while placement can often be an issue for architects, everyone was very receptive of our ideas and very sound conscious. While we definitely had to make compromises, the majority of our ideas were realised and when this happens on a project, when you get that level of cooperation with an architect and the team around you, it’s tremendous.” The BHS wanted the ability to provide small concert-volume sound reinforcement when needed. The list of requirements was extensive and Peter had to be ready for everything from a simple background music system for a gallery opening, to a full-on rock show. One of the main issues with BHS for Peter came down to size, as he explained: “When you’re talking about bands and higher pressure levels, then typically you would use larger loudspeakers. At BHS, the trick was for us to keep everything to smaller, unobtrusive boxes but still create good sound pressure levels.” Taking this into consideration, Peter chose a mixture of four JBL Control 26CT in-ceiling loudspeakers, two EAW UB82e loudspeakers, and 14 EAW UB52 two-way full range loudspeakers, together with four EAW SB-180 sub bass speakers, which are powered by two Ashly ne8250 amplifiers, one QSC CMX300V amplifier, four QSC RMX 2450 amplifiers and one QSC RMX 4050 amplifier. “In previous installations the Ashly ne8250 has proven itself to be tremendously reliable and powerful,” said Peter. “At 250W
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