Faced with a new space that was visually stunning but acoustically problematic due to the extensive use of hard, reflective surfaces such as glass and wood, TELUS Spark management knew they needed a special solution - one that could offer a high degree of intelligibility yet at the same time be as unobtrusive as possible to maintain the new facility's sleek visuals. Once Martin Topp, Western Canada manager for Bose Professional Systems, put Bose integrator Gerry Adams, of Calgary-based Adams Technologies, together with the TELUS technical management team, the solutions quickly became clear.
Adams took the TELUS team to the first public demonstration of the Bose RoomMatch system, held at the 2011 InfoComm Show in Orlando. They were impressed enough to offer the project to Adams and Bose on the spot. In fact, the system's performance was so remarkable that the plan expanded from merely the creation of sound systems for the Presentation Theatre and the facility's lower atrium (which would be used for day-to-day paging and other background use), to also duplicating the Theatre's planned sound system for a larger reinforcement package in the atrium, to be deployed for special events.
The atrium's system used Panaray MA12EX full-range modular line array loudspeakers, 18 of which were double-stacked in nine offset locations with a 502 B subwoofer below each stack. The system is driven by three PowerMatch PM8500N networkable amplifiers, each with 500 watts for each of its eight channels. A Bose ControlSpace ESP-88 engineered sound processor is used for system DSP, with control provided by a Bose CC-64 control centre. The left and right RoomMatch arrays are highly steerable and allowed the engineers to direct sound to the walls that had acoustical treatment, thus maximizing intelligibility.
The event sound system consists of five RoomMatch array modules and eight RMS215 subwoofers that are loaded onto carts and wheeled in when needed. The system is driven by seven four-kilowatt PM8500N amplifiers. The Presentation Theatre also has a pair of arrays, made up of three RoomMatch loudspeakers and two RMS215 subs per side, as well as a complement of 402 Series II and FreeSpace DS 100SE speakers and Panaray modular MB4 subs mounted as fills.
This gives the Theatre full 6.1 surround capability. "Each side has a stack of five speakers and they blend so well that as you walk from the front to the back it's very hard to distinguish where you're hearing the sound from one box to the next. The sound is not bouncing off everywhere, it's coming direct, and that makes for a really clean sound," stated Dennis Cheng, A/V Manager, TELUS Spark, the New Science Centre. Speaking about the audience's response, Barry Crean, VP Operations, TELUS Spark, the New Science Centre, stated, "They love the sound, they love the atmosphere that it provides in here." Cheng adds, "The level of engagement from the audience is just overwhelming."
(Jim Evans)
