Mid-Atlantic Community Church is typical of many young 21st century churches: steady growth has prompted moves to larger temporary quarters even as it embarks on the first phase of what will become its own permanent campus of buildings in Crofton, Maryland. The church's headquarter office is located in an office park warehouse. The congregation meets at Crofton Middle School every Sunday morning, after outgrowing its original space at Crofton Elementary School where its first services took place shortly after it was founded in 2004.
What the church, which offers children and adult ministries as well as annual activities and volunteer events in the community, needs most is flexibility when it comes to its media systems for its incipient new location. "The church's FOH mixer was very specific about how he needed his systems to power on," explained Art Reiger, founder and owner of Solsound, the Maryland-based AV systems integrator that just completed the installation of an RCF line array sound system, as well as a distributed paging system in the church's new "gymnatorium," a huge building that will house basketball courts, classrooms and a performance space. "He wanted the systems to have very specific delays between power-ons, to avoid any hiccups with components such as the IDR rack at back of house and the laptop he has connected to the FOH console."
"We had just completed [another] project where we used a Furman CN-2400S and a Furman CN-20MP, and the combination proved stellar," he said. "For the Mid-Atlantic Community Church project, the Furman CN series units let us program the exact delay intervals between component power-ups. In some cases that was as much as two minutes. In fact, the Furman system can give you as much as seven minutes delay time. No other product can do that. Plus, the ease of installation is excellent. As long as the cabling is correct, you can customize each unit perfectly and quickly using the DIP switches. From a designer and an installer's point of view, you can't get that combination of a high degree of flexibility and ease of installation anywhere else."
Reiger had the solution, one that began with a Furman CN-1800S SmartSequencer 15-amp bidirectional power sequencer for the BOH rack's 15-amp circuit and a CN-2400S 20-amp bidirectional power sequencer for the building's FOH 20-amp circuit. Used in conjunction with several Furman CN-15MP and CN-20MP MiniPorts, the Contractor Series SmartSequencer bidirectional power sequencers give Reiger and his team everything they need to meet the client's requirements.
The Furman CN-1800S (15 amp capacity) and CN-2400S (20 amp capacity) SmartSequencers are designed for commercial AV installers. The units combine AC power distribution, protection, filtration, sequential system power on/off, and optional compatibility with Panamax/Furman's BlueBOLT hosted remote power and energy management platform.
The CN-1800S and CN-2400S feature Furman's SmartSequencing technology, which allows large and complex AV systems to be powered on and off safely with the simple press of a button or turn of a key, even by nontechnical personnel. The SmartSequencer's bidirectional communications between installed units enables a primary unit to control and sequence multiple secondary units, ensuring that multi-zone electronic systems are powered on and off safely and dependably from a single control point across an entire installation. Units can be connected via current loop at runs of more than 1,000 feet, with backwards compatibility with Furman's legacy sequencers and/or third-party products.
Providing robust control options, the CN-1800S and CN-2400S are equipped with RS-232 ports and command sets for PC control or integration with control systems. An optional RS-232-to-Ethernet adaptor - sold separately - adds full IP-addressability to the unit so it may be controlled, programmed, and monitored from any Web-enabled device with Panamax/Furman's cloud-based BlueBOLT platform.
