Today’s post is by a good friend of mine, Greg Jackson. He uses his humor and dry wit to present an otherwise dusty topic… handling acoustical issues in your room.

The arcane science of acoustic design can be dated back to the earliest cave-dwellers, who have been found, through archeological excavation, to have hung animal pelts from the walls to keep their domiciles from feeling so “live.”

That’s not true. It was an allegory. About a cave. But it sounded good, no? Such is the case with a lot of the information floating around out there relating to acoustics: it sounds great, but it’s malarky. We see it a lot in regards to studio design, but it reaches a lot further than that. I had a guy call once that had a large, noisy piece of machinery in a room, and was wondering how many absorption panels he needed to buy to keep it from being heard outside. Answer? However many you need to stack under it to raise it a foot off the floor.

We’ve all experienced bad acoustics, whether we knew it or not. Gyms are an obvious example, but consider the restaurant that is so reflective, you have to shout to get your wife to hear you over the sound of utensils clanging together, or the doctor’s office where you can hear his conversation with the guy in the next exam room (that’s why the people in the waiting room were snickering when you left). The best way to dispel myth is with a little education, so, armed with the sword of truth, let’s hack to pieces the enemy forces of ignorance and let forth the battle cry “Scientia Potentia Est!!!” (Hey, I didn’t know GI Joe spoke Latin!)

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See if this scenario sounds familiar to you in any way: Mark needs a new projector for his facility but he’s not sure what to get. To avoid buying the wrong equipment, he talks to one of the people in charge of “tech” at his organization. The suggestion comes back that surely a 3500 lumen projector will be plenty of oomph (a good tech term) for the room. An order is placed and two weeks later, Mark has a new projector. Not only that, they also purchased a shiny new ceiling mount to hang their oomphy projector.

Mark and Mr. Tech get into the facility on a Saturday afternoon to install the projector. The first thing they do is try it on a cart to see where it should be installed. After turning it on and waiting for it to warm up, they begin to wonder how long it will take to get to full brightness. After a few moments, they realize it IS at full brightness, which will be somewhat dim for this room. Ok, they can deal with that. They roll the cart back to the spot where they would like to install the ceiling mount, only to find that they cannot zoom the projector to fill the screen completely (or it is too big and they can’t get it small enough). When they find the spot that actually works, they find they cannot install the ceiling mount because there’s a big (you fill in the bank… light, beam, etc) in the way. So… now what?

This scenario is, unfortunately, all too familiar in churches and businesses everywhere. How do you know what kind of projector to look for? Where do you start?

Considerations

There are many factors that come into play when choosing a projector. Let me address just a few that will get you pointed in the right direction. Here are a few questions you need to consider:

1. What is the intended use or application? Is this for a classroom or boardroom? Maybe it’s a portable church. Is this an established room that needs a permanent install? Each application calls for a different solution and it’s all too easy to grab the wrong projector, pay too much money for too much power, or undershoot your needs.

2. What is your screen size and ratio? Do you need 4:3 (standard) or 16:9 (widescreen)? While most projectors will adapt to what signal your sending, it’s always best to have a projector that’s native to your ratio. Otherwise you’ll end up with wasted screen space in the form of letter boxing or columns. You’ll also need your actual screen size for calculation as we’ll discuss in a moment.

3. What is your distance available for projection? This will be a major determination for your projector concerning brightness and throw ratio.

4. How much ambient light is present in your room? Do you have a large number of windows? What about projected light? Are your lights suspended from a low ceiling, forcing your lights to be lower than a 45 degree angle and possibly throwing light on your screen?

5. Are you planning front projection or rear projection?

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This past September of 2010, after much toil and a bit of frustration here and there, we opened our new online store, Moyers Online. Our main company, Moyers Group, has been in the AV Integration field for almost 3 decades. Over that time we’ve added many manufacturer lines to our catalog. We realized that we’ve been holding all that product goodness in reserve for our install company. We created Moyers Online to correct that.

This led to the decision to open the online store and make over 10,000 items available to everyone. Version 1 of our store was hosted by a great webfront store company called Shopify. I would highly recommend them for entry-level and smaller shops. They were very helpful and did a fabulous job setting us up and getting us going. Unfortunately, with our multitude of lines, we found ourself outgrowing their services too quickly.

From there, we began work on Version 2 of our site. We purchased an excellent shopping cart software from Interspire. It was almost like starting from scratch, but the effort has been worth it.

Run by and take a look. And if you happen to be reading this in the first 2 weeks of March 2011 and you purchase something, use the code “marchmadness” at checkout for a discount.

Hope you like the new look. I think it works well and the store is much easier to navigate.