City High School in Iowa City, US, has a new performing arts wing equipped with Q-Sys Core 250i integrated cores and GX5 power amplifiers from QSC.

The extension, which cost over $6 million to build, offers rehearsal rooms for the band, orchestra and choir, as well as the 500-plus students participating in the music and performing arts classes. The new facility also features a suite of smaller practice spaces, classrooms and other support amenities.

Douglass Communications designed and integrated the installed sound systems.

“We wanted a solution that would enable us to control everything off of an iPad,” said Matthew Bresch, senior technician and systems designer at Douglass Communications. “So the RS-232 control, to be able to control all of the equipment with the QSC Core, was a huge thing. Once we started looking at Q-Sys, we saw how much simpler it was to program than most of the other DSP programs that are out there.

To provide wireless transport control for the Tascam SS-R200 solid state recorder, Tascam CD-500B CD player and iPod docking station, students and teachers utilise a custom-designed interface on the iPad that was customised for City High. “The iPad interface at City High is super easy to operate. A user hits Play on the iPad and it plays a CD; they hit Record on the iPad and it records to the solid state drive from two microphones that hang in the room. So they can record a song that they’re working on as an orchestra and immediately listen back to it,” stated Bresch.

The Q-Sys Cores in the two band spaces – situated downstairs and measuring around 2,000 square feet each – enable room combining when the central divider is taken out.

Tara Bresch, operations manager at Douglass, designed the iPad interface using Q-Sys Designer software. “We gave it a uniform look for all four rooms. There are just two pages, Record and Playback,” she revealed. “For the teachers, it was important for it to be consistent in every room, and to be easy, too.”

Matthew Bresch concluded: “We tried to make the interface as simple as possible. All we gave them was a preamp gain, a channel mute, phantom power and a volume control to turn it up or down. We included meters just so that they could see what’s coming in and what’s going out.”

“The orchestra teacher is self-proclaimed ‘technically challenged’, and she says she’s using it all the time and has not had one issue, so that’s saying something about the user interface of the Q-Sys system.”

TAGS:professional wireless microphone, headworn microphones