Hear ye! New PA installed at courthouse
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Nodaway County North District Commissioner Robert Westfall stands beside the control shelf for a new exterior PA system installed this summer at the courthouse. The three-channel system came equipped with a wireless microphone and provides music-quality sound reinforcement from both the east and west lawns either separately or simultaneously.
Public gatherings centering around Nodaway County’s National Register of Historic Places-listed courthouse will be a little more crowd friendly in the future thanks to a new exterior sound system recently installed by Northwest Audio Visual.
Paid for with budgeted courthouse maintenance funds, the $4,000 system includes five music-quality public address horns, three covering the west lawn and two covering the east lawn. The weatherproof speakers are tucked away out of sight above the 135-year-old structure’s columned porticoes.
Controls for the system, which includes a performance-grade wireless Shure microphone, are located in a small chamber on the second floor, and operating the PA, according to Northwest Audio Visual’s Brett McLain, pretty much involves flipping a single power switch.
“It’s pretty much dummy proof,” McLain said. “We tried to make it as simple as possible so anybody can walk up there and plug and play.”
In addition to a power amplifier, he said, the unit also consists of a Yamaha three-channel microphone and line-level converter, essentially a commercial version of a home stereo tuner without the radio dial.
In addition to microphones, the converter can handle a variety of digital and analog audio input devices, including cellphones, tablets, CDs, tape players, thumb drives, and just about anything else.
The microphone is fully portable and allows users to speak from any portion of the courthouse grounds. Each set of speakers, those on the east and on the west, can be activated separately or used together.
While not as sophisticated as some of the other systems Northwest A/V has installed, including the mammoth PA and audio screen incorporated into the Bearcat Stadium scoreboard, McLain said the unit amounts to a professional-standard sound reinforcement outfit designed to handle everything from the spoken work to live and recorded vocal and instrumental music.
McLain, who has an affection for classic rock, said the system passed its field test — the playing of a recording by the late blues guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan — with flying colors.
The new PA replaces a small audio horn, now removed, which hadn’t worked in years and that was probably installed sometime in the 1980s.
Even when the thing was usable, North District Commissioner Robert Westfall said, the sound quality was more or less worse than having no sound reinforcement at all.
Event participants had complained about the old PA system in the past, Westfall said, and others availed themselves of a variety of frequently inadequate portable amplification units.
The courthouse grounds serve as a venue for a variety of events, including Veterans Day and Memorial Day commemorations, proclamations, and special observances like the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day walk by students at Northwest Missouri State University.
