DTE Energy has constructed a large new glass-roofed terrace space at the heart of its 'Town Square' at its Detroit, Michigan headquarters. The Town Square doubles as a cafeteria and corporate meeting area, and features 'green' technology throughout including cutlery and plates made from fully compostable materials. A compact but high power, high quality audio and video system was required to deliver presentations in the busy, daylit space.
The space is 140ft x 100ft (43m x 30m) with a sloping ceiling that starts at 40ft (12m) and goes down to 18ft (5.5m), and has three walls of brick and glass, a tile terrazzo floor and 16 12ft (3.6m) wide glass skylights - a recipe for acoustical nightmares. Local system integrator City Animation based out of Troy, Michigan, brought in consultant Dave Spoelhof from Accurate Audio Consultants to analyze the space in fine detail.
City Animation's Marshall Copeman comments: "The acoustic challenges were the obvious - the huge expanses of glass including the massive skylights, the hard floor and long throw that the system had to achieve. With such a high ceiling and at a variable height along with the glass/brick walls and floor of tile terrazzo we were very concern about intelligibility issues. Plus for its use as a cafeteria we needed to have even coverage, something we would normally have done with a distributed sound system. That wasn't going to work because of the highly reflective nature of the space, and lack of suitable loudspeaker locations."
Following extensive EASE measurements Spoelhof's recommendation was, says Copeman: "that the right choice for the loudspeakers was the Renkus-Heinz Iconyx IC24. The tall, steerable line arrays gave the control and volume we needed to make it work as not only a cafeteria, but a corporate meeting space and a place for high energy - pun intended - events to take place in."The customer came and heard the speakers at Infocomm 2007, with the help of Casey McWilliams at CM Sales, and closed the deal on them there.
"The IC24s' thin profile meant that, once we had created custom brackets to mount them, and Renkus-Heinz had custom-painted the loudspeakers in PPG Crumb Cookie to match the columns and rest of the materials used, they virtually disappear into the support structure. Which makes their phenomenal coverage all the more remarkable - the volume level is the same no matter if you are 15ft to 120ft [4.5m - 36m] away."
The audio system is fed via a rack of equipment that includes a Lectrosonics DM-16/24 digital audio matrix mixer, 10 Shure ULX/P wireless microphones, Symon "TargetVision" software for the digital signage, Denon DN-V300 DVD players, Marantz PMD-371 CD player, a Contemporary Research ATSC Tuner and multiple laptop inputs.
The video wall features a matrix of 36 Akira MIS4201 edgeless plasma displays driven from an Extron, Magenta Research and Analog Way-based system.
The system is designed to be operated in either of two ways. An end-user version provides basic control and functionality, while a "teched system" allows full operation by DTE Energy's Corporate Communications department with image mag, multiple computers and video sources being routed through a Barco ScreenPro II system.
Marshall Copeman adds: "The sound system has worked flawlessly from the first day it was turned on. We're pleased to see that no additional tweaks have been needed since installation, other than setting overall volume levels, and the customer is delighted."
(Lee Baldock)
