Located in Riddarholmen, the Brick Romanesque structure is an example of a late 1800s institution building, and one of the few remaining in Europe. Now repurposed to offer tours as well as an array of party, event and conference spaces, Gamla Riksarkivet lives on after its official closure as an archive in 1968.
Originally without electricity, the building incorporated vast windows into its design in order to allow natural light to flood in during the day. Such was its importance, the building was built on a base of cast iron to increase fire safety, with cast-iron column supports, iron bookshelves, steel doors and sandstone frames and sills. With this plethora of harsh reflective surfaces creating a tough audio environment, the client sought a great-sounding retrofit installation with a small, unobtrusive footprint so as not to detract from the building's striking interior. Integrator Jouni Niemi of 08audio was handed the challenging task of delivering an audio installation and chose Genelec's 4000 series as part of the solution.
"This fantastic building initially presented numerous acoustic issues to us," says Jouni. "As with any old building, we were restricted with our ability to place speakers optimally. With so many hard surfaces, this further compounded the challenge of ensuring consistently clean and neutral sound throughout the install.
"With the installed Genelec 4030Bs, we were able to use Low Cut on DIP switches instead of using Equalization external processing, allowing us to achieve a flat and consistent frequency response in each speaker, without additional equipment."
(Jim Evans)
