With more than 250 degree programs and an academic reputation as one of the world’s premier public colleges, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosts a vast range of lectures, meetings, conferences and other campus events on a daily basis. To better facilitate these activities, the university recently opened the Alice Campbell Alumni Center, a state-of-the-art facility that features signal routing and processing capabilities by Lectrosonics.
With 54,000sq-ft of space, the alumni center includes a reception gallery, library, conference rooms, lounges, administrative offices and an outdoor patio. Matt Sherer, lead installation technician for CITES Classroom Technologies, a group of IT and A/V specialists who handle the university’s vast technology infrastructure, discussed the challenge the new complex presented.
“The main ballroom is a large multipurpose area that is used for everything from social gatherings to lectures and conferences,” Sherer said. “During the design and construction of this building, it became apparent we needed the capability to route a variety of inputs to multiple destinations. Of equal importance, we wanted the ability to program several configurations so that they could be easily recalled — depending upon how the room was to be set up. To address these issues, we installed a Lectrosonics DM1612 digital automatic matrix mixer.”
The DM1612 is a digital audio processing, mixing and routing system for controlling multiple microphones and loudspeakers. The basic architecture consists of 16 mic/line inputs and 12 outputs with a full DSP-based matrix that enables every input to be routed to any or all outputs. Following the A-D conversion at each input, the signal passes through multiple DSP filters, an automatic digital feedback eliminator, a compressor and a digital delay. In the matrix, gain is adjustable from –69dB to +20dB in 1dB steps at each cross point. Each of the 12 outputs provides a digital delay, multiple DSP filters and a compressor/limiter.
For more information, visit www.lectrosonics.com/lecnet/dm1612.htm.
