New church sound systems
Last month at St Columba's, we finally had some lovely new AV equipment installed. As the bloke sorting it all out (or "project champion", as I might be referred to in a more buzzwordy organisation), I thought I'd share how it went...
Planning
The plan was pretty simple. We knew we had £8,000 to spend and we quickly worked out that we could like-for-like replace the microphones and hearing loop in the church, and get a nice new projector and speakers installed in the hall.
Tender
One of our church members who works in procurement put together a nice detailed tender document spelling out what we were after, and, armed with this, we called in three firms to quote. Expression Media got the job partly on the strength of recommendation from other churches, partly for being second-cheapest, but mostly because I was really impressed by their honesty.
They explained that a couple of existing pieces of kit - notably the amplifier for our hearing aid loop - could be kept and re-used and thus we could save a bit of money. Neither of the other suppliers suggested that.
Delivery
Expression did a top-notch job of the installation, finishing it in one and a half working days to work around the heavy usage of our building. It's all finished off nicely with some lockable cabinets to stop people messing around with the controls.
Aftermath
As is so often the way with these things, nobody has had a word to say about AV at church since the upgrade. Which means it's all working perfectly!