I’m concerned that you seem obsessed with a second safety, and how it’s affixed, when the major consideration is how the fixed installation is designed in the first place. Is every Lodestar safetied at all times? No. Because the design has safety built in for its operating limits.
In your situation, rated speakers, rated eyes, rated steels, put up in a place by experienced people in a place designated by the structural engineer with two points per speaker ( or three for angling) Will suffice and not need an additional safety.
The fact that you seem to be focusing on the wrong end of the equation ( how to basket a safety) Means that you perhaps don’t have the experience to make judgements in this matter.
It is commendable however that you’ve reached out to a technical forum with precise description and a desire to make the install better.
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Very long reply.
I actually don’t think their present hanging method (threaded rod and Unistrut above the ceiling) for the size and weight on these speakers is wrong. It is a commonly used method for this type of work. Where the problem came in is that 11 of the 17 speakers (hung there now) themselves don’t have any hang points and those speakers should never have been used. I have been telling them that for years. The church did this with their employees and volunteers. The places that the speakers are hung makes it very difficult to properly time align the system due to the odd placements and multiple overlaps. And I told them I would not tell them the right places to hang them because of the 11 that shouldn’t have been used in the first place.
The present system doesn’t sound bad but they want it to sound better. They are doing internal renovations that include extending the stage into the room, it has been recessed into the middle of the long wall. The room (seating area) not counting the stage is 178 feet wide and 92 feet deep. It can seat about 2000 people. Before this place was bought by the church it was a large catering hall capable of being broken up into smaller rooms and the room is a little weird to be used for a church. It is all one large room (sanctuary) now.
We recommended Fulcrum Acoustics speakers and demonstrated one to them last week and they were impressed. The new speakers are about 40 pounds per with hanging hardware (Yoke) attached and will be hung in different places for the most part then the present speakers. It will still be a distributed system. If they do the same thing as they did above the suspended ceiling for the present ones I don’t see a problem with that part. The present system as I said has 17 speakers in a distributed sound system due to the ceiling heights. I say heights because it varies at different places in the room.
As I said before. The new speakers (21 of them will be used) have multiple fly points and an optional yoke and points for that. This makes it a lot easier to aim the speakers at each point. The yoke has a place for a threaded rod to attach. So the speaker with yoke will be hung by one point (threaded rod) coming out of the ceiling, attached above to the structural steel. Some of the points will require Unistrut spanning between the steel to get the point in the right place. That (because there is only one point to hang the speaker) is why I want them to also use a backup cable as a safety. Just yesterday I was told that the people scheduled to do this are builders with industrial experience. The total weight of the new hang will be less than the old hang. I was also told that there will be a meeting with them coming up soon. So I will get a chance to see if they know what they are doing.
I am not obsessed with just the backup. But I want to be sure that this time there is a backup. I understand why you might think that way but you don’t understand my role in this install. I can’t tell them exactly what to do I can only suggest. This is their facility and there responsibility. I am a consultant to the church and the sound company I am working with this on. How they are hung is out of my hands, where they are hung is part of my responsibility and I have been working with Fulcrum Acoustics on that. But I will do everything in my power to get them to do it right. The sound company proposed that they do the install but for some reason the church decided to use this building company. And the sound company is on the same page as I am with this.
I am not a rigger and don’t even play one on TV but I have worked a lot with riggers we had doing temporary hangs and permanent hangs so I have observed what they do and over the years I have learned a lot from them. But I am not fooling myself to thinking I am a rigger. I also won’t do rigging because I am not insured to do that. The sound company I am working with on this job is. This install just seems to have some other challenges, including in places getting to the steel above the suspended ceiling grid. I have asked here about this because I am concerned and wanted to know if the company that will be hanging the speakers would be doing a backup properly or not. I would use a beam clamp on the steel with a hanging eye-bolt and have a wire rope shackled up there and that would be shackled to a hanging eye-bolt in the speaker. With as little slack as possible on the wire rope.
When I was involved in a speaker upgrade in my church we used some rather heavy EAW speakers. That was a left and right hang weighing over 300lbs per side. We ordered them in plain wood and we had them stained to match the wood in that church. On my recommendation we had a structural engineer come in and certify the amount of weight that the Glued Laminate beams could take and also sign-off on the hanging method. We then had the aforementioned rigging company do the hang. We used some ATM flyware parts to hang them. Since then that church has been completely rebuilt. I have asked multiple times what happened to all of the equipment but I can’t get a straight answer. It wasn’t reused in the new building. The person in charge of that at the time of the rebuild has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, so getting information from him and anyone else is next to impossible.
I hope this answers some of your questions.
