St. Margaret's Episcopal School

Project Summary 
 

Client: St. Margaret's Episcopal School, Orange County, CA
 

Project Type: AV System Refresh — Design-Build

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Role: Audio Visual Integrator

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Completed: Summer 2024 (Official Completion December 2024)

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Timeline: Approx. 85 days on-site

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Spaces: Main Theater, Black Box Theater, Dressing Rooms, Green Rooms, Production Shop, Classrooms

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Key Systems: Meyer Sound PA, Custom Sub Array, Dante Audio Networking, AV over IP Video Matrix, QSC Q-SYS DSP, Crestron Control
 

Project Overview
 

St. Margaret's Episcopal School is a private K–12 institution in Orange County, California, known for its academic excellence and well-resourced facilities. Its Performing Arts Center — built through a major donor gift and designed to serve both the school community and its broader arts programming — had been operating on a 2012-era AV system that no longer met the functional or technical expectations of the facility. After more than a decade of use, the original installation was showing its age: the main PA system was ill-suited to the acoustical demands of the space, the video infrastructure lacked the flexibility of modern AV over IP architecture, and the school's single technical operator had been managing workarounds and weekly system reboots just to keep things running.

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Procraft Media was brought in directly by the school to serve as the design-build integrator for a full system refresh. Over a compressed summer installation window, Procraft designed, engineered, and implemented a modern AV infrastructure across the main theater, the Black Box Theater, and a range of back-of-house and classroom spaces, transforming the PAC into a facility capable of meeting the demands of the school and the expectations of its community.

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Spaces & System Scope

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The project touched nearly every AV system in the building. The scope was developed over nine weeks of detailed pre-construction programming meetings with school stakeholders — an intentional process that ensured the final design reflected how each space was actually used, not just how it appeared on paper. Key spaces and systems included:
 

• Main Theater: New PA system, custom rigged speaker clusters, catwalk-mounted sub array, and updated signal routing

• Black Box Theater: Updated AV systems integrated with facility-wide routing infrastructure

• Back of House: Dressing rooms, green rooms, hallways, and the set-build production shop — all tied into the video matrix and audio distribution

• Classrooms: Standalone upgrades integrated into the overall AV over IP architecture

• Control Room: Rebuilt central rack system supporting the full facility's AV infrastructure

 

The breadth of the scope — spanning both performance and educational environments — required careful coordination between programming, design documentation, and on-site execution to ensure every system worked as a unified whole.

 

System Architecture & Technology

 

The new system was built around modern AV over IP standards, replacing the legacy analog and matrix infrastructure with a flexible, network-based architecture capable of supporting the school's current and future needs.

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Main PA — Meyer Sound

The centerpiece of the refresh was the main theater PA. The original system used a popular manufacturer's product that was simply the wrong application for the space — not a failing of the brand, but a mismatch between the product and the acoustic and operational demands of the room. Procraft specified a Meyer Sound solution as the replacement, selected after live listening demos that included a visit to an existing installation to confirm sound quality before the client committed.

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The main clusters are rigged at the proscenium, with a custom-engineered sub array mounted mid-catwalk — approximately 15 to 20 feet behind the main clusters. The sub array consists of six dual 15-inch subwoofers clustered together, built from a custom steel structure incorporating existing rigging points rather than a prefabricated fly bar, because no off-the-shelf solution existed for that configuration. The entire Meyer system is self-powered, which eliminated the need for amplifier racks but required coordination with the school's electrical contractor to add distributed power circuits throughout the space. Because the students train on the equipment they wanted to stay with Yamaha Mixing consoles. PCM replaced the existing Yamaha CL5 (moved to the Black Box) with a Yamaha DM7 with Expansion Controller and Theater Software Package

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Dante Audio Networking

The audio infrastructure was redesigned around Dante-based networking, enabling flexible, software-defined signal routing across the entire facility. This replaced the physical patch gymnastics of the previous system and gave the school's technical operator the ability to route audio to any destination — dressing rooms, green rooms, classrooms — without leaving the console or rewiring anything. QSC Q-SYS served as the DSP platform, handling signal processing, routing logic, and integration with the control layer.

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AV over IP Video Matrix

The video infrastructure was rebuilt as a fully distributed AV over IP matrix, allowing any source to be routed to any destination across the building. This replaced the legacy video matrix with a system that scales with the facility's needs and supports modern signal formats — enabling everything from classroom instruction to full production support from a single, unified infrastructure.

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Control System

The Crestron-based control system was programmed with soft patching built into the console workflow, reducing the operational burden on the school's technical staff. Preset configurations, simplified routing, and streamlined touchpanel interfaces replaced the multi-step workarounds that had defined the previous system.

 

Integration Challenges & Risk Management
 

Compressed Timeline:
The single largest challenge on the project was time. St. Margaret's runs programming year-round, meaning summer access was not guaranteed. Initially, Procraft planned to work differential hours — 3:00 PM to midnight — to share the campus with students still in attendance. After negotiation, the school ultimately consolidated its summer activities and gave Procraft full site access for approximately 85 days. That window was enough — but only because of how aggressively the team moved.

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The old system came out in a day and a half. Re-rigging was underway within three days. Racks were built on-site because the system was in active use right up until Procraft arrived. Deliveries of large equipment quantities had to be carefully staged, inventoried, and tested on arrival. There was no margin for delay.

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The PA Pivot:
Mid-project, the originally specified PA product — sourced from a German manufacturer — became unavailable within the required delivery window. With the installation schedule already locked, Procraft pivoted quickly: vendors were brought in for a live demo in the theater space, and when the first option didn't satisfy the client, Procraft located a nearby facility already running the proposed Meyer system and arranged for school representatives to visit and listen for themselves. The client signed off. The new system was ordered, delivered, and installed without materially impacting the project schedule. The timeline was so tight Procraft sent a dedicated truck to the Meyer Will Call dock and picked up the PA and drove it straight to the site.

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Legacy Infrastructure & Cable Management:
Any theater of this age carries the weight of its history in the walls — cable runs, patch points, and infrastructure that was accurate in 2012 but may or may not reflect what's actually in the building today. Overlaying a modern AV over IP system on top of existing cable infrastructure meant navigating a large, complex signal environment with imperfect documentation. Every extender, every panel, every wall plate had to be evaluated in the context of the new architecture and modified or replaced accordingly.

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Control Room Rack Configuration:
The central control room presented a spatial challenge that required creative problem-solving. The new racks — necessarily deeper to accommodate the system's complexity — would have encroached significantly on the production workspace if oriented in the conventional outward-facing configuration. The solution was to turn the racks to face each other and pivot them on axis to align with the overhead cable entry points from the ceiling. It's an unconventional approach, but it preserved the usability of the space while maintaining full access to the equipment.

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Rigging:
What could have been a multi-day scaffolding and man-lift operation turned out to be executable from the existing catwalk, avoiding the time and cost of building out temporary rigging access. The team executed the rigging phase ahead of schedule — a meaningful time savings given the overall project compression.

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Process & Collaboration
 

One of the defining elements of Procraft's approach on this project was the pre-construction programming process. Over approximately nine weeks, Procraft conducted regular stakeholder meetings to methodically work through the scope — not just from a technical standpoint, but from an operational one. Theater stakeholders, classroom users, back-of-house staff, and school administrators were all brought into the process at the appropriate points, ensuring that the finished system would function the way the people using it actually expected.
 

This kind of investment in upfront scoping is not universal in the AV integration industry. The alternative — discovering misaligned expectations during commissioning or after handoff — is a far more costly outcome, both financially and in terms of the client relationship. By the time Procraft reached the installation phase, the scope was fully understood and agreed upon by all parties.

Procraft also coordinated directly with the school's electrical contractor to manage the power circuit requirements created by the fully-powered Meyer system — a multi-step process that required load analysis, panel capacity assessment, and circuit distribution planning across all speaker locations.

On the programming side, the QSC Q-SYS environment required a dedicated programming team working in parallel with the installation crew — and because Q-SYS allows only a single programmer in the environment at a time, this required careful coordination between the field team and the programming team to avoid conflicts, particularly during the compressed final push of the project.

 

Results & Ongoing Support
 

St. Margaret's Episcopal School serves the children of families who invest significantly — both in tuition and in philanthropy — in the institution's facilities. The original PAC was funded by a single donor who wanted a performance space worthy of the school's reputation. Maintaining that standard matters. When the school's director listened to the completed PA system for the first time, the response was unambiguous: far beyond what they expected.

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For the students who take the stage — even for a single line or a brief musical moment in a school production — and for the families in the audience, the quality of the sound and the reliability of the system is part of what makes the experience meaningful. That's the benchmark the school holds its facility to, and it's what Procraft delivered.

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For the school's technical operator, the impact was equally concrete. The weekly reboot cycle is gone. Routing audio or video no longer requires gymnastics through a legacy system. Dante soft patching, intuitive console workflows, and a coherent control layer have made the job of running the PAC substantially simpler — which means fewer failures, faster setups, and more time focused on the performance rather than the infrastructure.

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The success of the PAC refresh has also extended the relationship: Procraft is currently engaged on a new Commons building for St. Margaret's — a ground-up construction project on the opposite end of campus, scheduled to open in late 2025.

Theatre images provided from www.smes.org.