This recent renovation wasn’t the first time that AMT Systems set foot in All Saints Episcopal Church. The Santa Clarita, Calif.-based integration firm designed and installed a sound system for the Pasadena house of worship in 1990.
So owner Tim Carlson had some familiarity with the facility’s quirks — its ample cement, tiny installer crawl spaces and old, ornate tile that “we were not going to touch” — when it set out to update several aspects of the technology over two decades later.
One area that wasn’t emphasized in 1990 but is now deemed extremely important is a solution to ensure that hearing-impaired congregants are able to enjoy the service.
AMT installed a Listen Technologies loop induction assistive listening system. Guests with T-Coil enabled hearing aids can hear the service as well as others without any obvious enhancement. Guests without T-Coil benefit from Listen Technologies loop receivers that allow them to receive the signal and amplify it through sanitary earbuds.
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Using Listen Technologies products, AMT Systems was able to overcome a significant challenge for any space in which hearing-impaired folks can benefit from some assistance as they listen.
But don’t take our word for it; let’s see what the integrators have to say about it.
Reviewer: Tim Carlson, president and Mike Shelton, senior systems engineer, of AMT Systems.
Tell us about the All Saints Church project.
Carlson: When you’re dealing with a public space that has a sound system, you’re required to provide a system that augments the sound system so that an individual who is hard of hearing can hear more clearly.
We’ve purchased tons of those types of transmitters from Listen Technologies in the past. It’s like a little FM radio station and you can broadcast what you’re putting through the speaker system wirelessly.
Somebody can have almost like a little Walkman receiver and a personal ear speaker. The [personal ear speaker] is the way we do it. Listen makes a nice plastic that goes over the ear piece so it’s nice and clean.
- Sound quality
- Manufacturer support
- It’s invisible and it sounds good
What are the three biggest negatives — “cons” — for an installer using this product?
If you don’t have the space or if you don’t do it during initial construction, it may not be possible to do. We have the loop system, plus we have the wireless RF system and we did that because we couldn’t physically get wire to the chapel because it was blocked off by concrete.
We didn’t do the stage because we had fears of electric guitars, etc., giving problems with the loop and we didn’t want to screw up somebody’s performance.
