St Hilda’s College is a college affiliated with The University of Melbourne, providing a residential community for students from all parts of regional Victoria, interstate and overseas. It provides accommodation, academic and pastoral support for 220 undergraduate students.
St Hilda’s Dining Room
DIB Australia has been working with St Hilda’s for nearly fifteen years, working closely with the college’s Maintenance department to help keep the original systems in working order. Recently, St Hilda’s set out to extend their dining room at the college.
The Challenge
The dining hall was original to the College, which was only 100 residents in the mid-60s. However, since it had doubled in size over the years, the hall needed to be extended. The dining hall is one of the college’s largest spaces, so had further potential as a venue space.
In addition, all the existing systems were reaching end of life. The screen was an old 4:3 ratio screen, there were problems with sound from the older speakers, and the projector image was dull due to the age of the projector.
In particular, the hall has a lot of hard surfaces like large picture windows, hard floors, solid furniture which is always a challenge for delivering clear audio in any environment.
Our solution
As St Hilda’s had planned the extension to allow for a flexible space – one room or two, DIB designed a flexible system to match these needs. A high specification EPSON EB-L1505UNL WUXGA 4K Enh 12,000 ANSI Projector was coupled to an EPSON G7000/Laser wide throw zoom lens to accommodate a bright and clear picture.
A multi speaker layout was specified including fold back speakers for the stage, column speakers front of house and additional speakers back through the room. The column speakers in particular were chosen to provide superior directional control of the sound in this difficult acoustic environment.
A range of Sennheiser microphones – both handheld and cardioid lapel – were also specified to provide superior quality sound for presenters and entertainers.
A key feature of the installation was a master control panel – An Extron 10” Wall Mount Touchlink Pro Touchpanel. This control panel allowed us to take what is quite a complex system with multiple vision & audio inputs, as well as the ability to use the spaces individually or in a combined set up, and simplify the end user control so that all operations could be completed in as little as 3 button presses.
The Space
This dining room was a straightforward area on the surface, however the hard, reflective surfaces and brightly lit areas required smart choice of equipment and intelligent design from our Consultants. DIB was able to deliver both high quality audio and visuals to this new expanded space for St Hilda’s College – a long term high valued client.
As is the case with all DIB projects, we remove and responsibly recycle old equipment to ensure it doesn’t go to landfill.
This is part of our sustainability promise along with our commitment to be a carbon neutral organisation.
Call DIB Australia for help with your project – (03) 9457 4800.