Trinity Sound Company (TSC) recently completed an upgrade to the in-house music playback and paging system at Brea Community Center that included a QSC Audio Q-Sys Core 250i processor and two additional CX Series multichannel amplifiers.
- The community center, located adjacent to the Brea Civic and Cultural Center in the heart of the city, which is located about 25 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, offers facilities for business and community meetings, youth and adult education, and health and fitness activities.
- This was one of the very first installations of the lower cost Q-Sys Core 250i, notes Devin DeVore, president and owner of TSC, an Ontario, CA-based company that offers live and installed sound production services as well as studio and remote recording.
- “The accessible price point of the new cores opens up Q-Sys to a host of new facilities,” Devin said. “We like the platform, and we like its possibilities. A lot of those competing systems are fixed configurations. The Q-Sys Core 250i offers more flexible options for growth and to really build a network system. It’s not just one box with limited inputs and limited control.”
- The Brea Community Center houses everything from a basketball gym and aerobics classes to meeting rooms, according to DeVore, who also installed projectors and other AV equipment during the upgrade to the center.
- Two of the center’s in-house staff have the Q-Sys Control iOS app installed on their respective iPhones. “We divided the system into 12 zones, and we have some room combining going on,” he added. "The two setup guys, who do everything from moving tables to setting up the banquet room, have control of the room combining and the overall volume.”
- TSC retained the previously installed QSC Audio CX Series multichannel amplifiers and added two more CX Series amps—a four-channel and an eight-channel.
- “Using the DataPort cables, we were able to link into the network, so we have load monitoring and system performance data that shows up on the app, too, so that the facility staff can make sure that everything is working and that there are no blown speakers,” DeVore said.
- Additional system control is available in the main entrance lobby. “From the front desk they can page into different areas,” he explained. “Using the Q-Sys Control app we also created a few pages for them to control the room combine, and control their music playback. We set the system up to play back music using the audio file player that’s in Q-Sys. That runs on a calendar, so every day at 7 a.m. it fires up a playlist and plays music through the concourse.
- “They run a bunch of afternoon programs, so at 2:30 p.m., the music turns off, because there are a lot of kids running around. As things mellow out again in the evening it turns back on and runs until about 10 o’clock at night.”
- He continued, “Along with playback in the Q-Sys we also have it streaming Pandora through an iPad. We used one of the inputs at the front desk on the paging station as another input from a CD/iPod dock. If anyone wants to play something from the front desk they can go to the iPad, or wirelessly control it from their iPhone and switch inputs. So there are a few different ways that they can get music going through the space and route and control things pretty easily.”
