Balwyn High School is located in Melbourne’s east and has an enviable reputation for learning. The school offers a wide range of co-curricular activities and at present one in five students hold a leadership position.
To complement existing classroom AV facilities, the school incorporated a theatrette in the new ‘DeZign’ Art and Technology Building to create a high quality movie viewing environment. The Audio Visual (AV) Manager, Nigel Brown, approached DIB Australia to provide a solution for the design and installation of the theatrette AV equipment.
DIB Australia has tailored a dedicated solution to suit the school’s needs. The Epson-TW5500 home theatrette projector was selected as the main theatrette projector due to its high contrast ratio that can provide a rich and vibrant coloured image, bringing content to life.
This projected image is displayed onto a large 126’’ (2790mm wide x 1570mm) 16:9 screen using an LP Morgan Galleria custom Plana AT fixed frame, covering the centre speaker. This specially designed acoustic transparent screen has sound transmission patterns similar to high quality speakers. “The centre speaker, being predominantly for speech content of the film, provides a real sense of the person talking directly to the audience with the sound coming through the projector screen – this brings the movie content to ‘life’ and is a key feature of this installation.”
Surrounding the theatrette is a high quality full 7.1 sound systems, including 3 x Turbosound 8” and horn TCX series speakers with the front speakers recessed into the wall providing a very neat finish. The main centre channel is wall mounted behind the screen and 4 x Turbosound TCX series 8” horn speakers for the surround and rear channels are fitted at higher level. The system is then driven by power amplifiers with approximately 250w per channel installed into the AV equipment rack.
To protect the projector from accidental damage or theft, a projector security cage was installed. An installed Joey Lite control panel simplifies the operation of the system with 24 programmable buttons (on, off, volume control, source selection etc.). The entire AV system is controlled by environmental power control which means a multi stage process is used to power up equipment limiting noise artefacts and heavy power draw. The system also features power filtering and surge protection to protect the sensitive electronics from potential harmful spikes.
With this new installation, students at Balwyn High School are able to experience film texts and other media content as the creators intended them to be experienced. This in turn has led to greater student engagement, a core focus of the school’s approach to teaching and learning.