RICHMOND, VIRGINIA: From the outside, the Paul R. Cramer Center for the Arts looks just like any other building on the campus of Richmond, Virginia's Steward School. Step inside and you'll find that the new 49,565 square-ft. arts center houses a first-class, 500-seat proscenium theater. These are last phases of a capital project that began in 1998 with the athletic fields.

Designed to host all of Steward's musical and dramatic events, as well as a variety of other assemblies, the theater is in use at least once a week, and five times that often throughout May. But don't let the graduation ceremonies and lectures fool you. This is not your typical high school auditorium. Custom-designed turquoise carpeting adorned with a red leaf pattern, deep red seats, warm turquoise walls, and rich red oak trim exude a type of sophistication rarely found in secondary schools. Numerous curved spaces, including the 150-seat horseshoe-shaped balcony add to the aesthetics of the space, while creating superior acoustics.

"It's really professional looking," says Steward School technical director Andrew Mudd. "The architect and the theatrical consultants created a wonderful space."

Now it was up to acoustical design consulting firm Miller, Beam & Paganelli to create a sound system to coalesce with the design. The issue facing systems design consultant Eric Willis was how to implement this on "a shoestring audio budget" to maximize the architecturally and acoustically stunning dŽcor. Willis says he managed to stay within the $85,000 budget with very careful equipment selection." There wasn't any room for fluff," he says. "It was the usual "wanting it all without costing a fortune" dilemma.

Here were some of the issues facing Willis. The school wanted dual mixing positions. Willis had provided this capability on similar projects using a matrix system to switch between house mixing and control room mixing with the touch of one button. However, he found it too expensive to split all the microphone signals before they got to the console. Instead, he used multi-pin jumpers, allowing users at Steward to set outputs, manually, on a multi-pin connector patch panel.

Other parts of the project seemed to fall at a price well within the school's budget. The 40-channel Mackie mixing console gave the school's sound engineers all the flexibility they needed to mix a variety of events, while EAW biamplified loudspeakers and Sennheiser Evolution 300 Series wireless microphones were cost-effective, quality choices. Willis recalls that this installation, completed last summer, marked one of his first projects using evolution wireless systems. Using two EW 312 omni-directional lavalier microphones and four EW 365 condenser super-cardioid capsule microphones and the EM 300 rack-mounted, true diversity receiver, Willis put his trust in the Sennheiser name. As usual, he was not disappointed.

"Once the remote antennae were mounted along the control room wall at the back of the theater, we had excellent RF reception throughout the entire space. The sonic quality, ease of setup and use, reliability, and overall flexibility of these systems is unmatched at the moment for these types of facilities." The school also makes use of existing wireless microphone systems from a different manufacturer, and the overall difference in sonic quality was obvious as soon as they were turned on.

The high budget feel of the audio system benefited from the school's hydraulic pit that is capable of rising to function as a thrust stage, or descending to create an orchestra pit, or retreat down to the basement level, Willis explained.

The new system got its first workout during a student production of "The King and I." Technical director Andrew Mudd mic'd a cast of fifty, along with a six-piece orchestra. The system delivered all Andrew had expected. "We took the system through its paces for "The King and I,"" he says. "The audio system is everything we hoped - rich, full sound - and it met the budgetary requirements."