Guitar Center Professional Helps Outfit Islamic Center of Hernando County, Florida

	The interior of the Islamic Center of Hernando County, in Spring Hill, Florida. The Center recently upgraded its audio system with Bose Panaray units and other components sourced through GC Pro.

Like many houses of worship, the Islamic Center of Hernando County, in Spring Hill, Florida, had some specific audio issues: The main hall of the mosque had a reverb time measured at six seconds, enough to reduce speech intelligibility to near zero, and a second prayer room reserved for women had no separate sound system at all and had to rely solely on reflected sound from the men's prayer hall for prayer leadership. A visit to Guitar Center Professional (GC Pro), the outside sales division of Guitar Center that focuses on the needs of professional users, solved the space's audio problems.

Last August, Christian Sound Installations of Valrico, Florida, one of the certified affiliates in the GC Pro Affiliate program, installed a Bose Panaray MA12EX full-range modular line array with four speakers in the men's prayer hall, controlled via a Bose Control Space ESP-88 processor and powered by a Crown XTi 4002 amplifier. In addition, the women's prayer hall now has its own sound system consisting of Bose FreeSpace DS 100SE loudspeakers powered by a Crown XTi 1002 amplifier. A Tascam CD-200i CD player with integrated Apple iPod dock serves as the music source for both systems. When praying, the Imam's lavaliere microphone was often muffled when his head bowed to the floor; a Countryman E6 wireless headset supplied by GC Pro solved that issue. And the main hall's reverberation problem was eliminated with the application of acoustical absorption materials to the walls, cutting the six-second reverb time down to three seconds.

Mick Hall, account manager at the Tampa Bay-area GC Pro location, says that what was accomplished cost-effectively at the Islamic Center of Hernando County is an example of how keenly GC Pro can help houses of worship solve their AV concerns. The solutions for any AV problem are within GC Pro's extensive inventory, and ways to implement those solutions are at the ready through the Affiliates program, which allows customers to access the talents and skills of certified acoustical designers, acoustical architects, systems integration companies and other technical services organizations nationwide.

"We have all of the resources necessary to handle any situation, large or small, from renovation to ground up construction," says Hall. "We have the product and systems solutions and we have the talent, in the form of people like Paul Garner, owner of Christian Sound Installations, who can integrate those solutions in the best ways possible. That's what GC Pro has to offer."

Hall elaborated on how the system was put together: "Traditional mosques are very beautiful and also very live acoustic spaces," he stated. "The client wanted a system that was small and unobtrusive to the room décor but powerful enough to be an effective upgrade of the existing ceiling speaker system. The main request of the sound system was that it be capable of substantially amplifying the sound in the space while still remaining open and natural enough to give the impression of no PA. It was also a requirement that the system be capable of extremely wide horizontal and controlled vertical dispersion to minimize reflections and artifacts caused by excessive spill on architectural details. Finally, the complete control for the system needed to be as compact and user friendly as possible. The system with Bose MA12EX Panaray speakers in the main room and DS100SE speakers in the anteroom along with the ESP-88 processor and CC-64 remote was an eloquent and high quality solution to solve all of the integration and performance criteria."