The campus' central meeting point is a large, multipurpose room used for everything from lunches to corporate meetings and all types of presentations. It's a bright, airy, and welcoming space, but as Richard Trombitas of New York-based Cardone, Solomon and Associates explains, the room has long been an acoustical challenge.
"It's a really nice looking space, but not great for spoken word intelligibility," says Trombitas. "It's got a fairly high ceiling, a wall of windows, and lots of reflective surfaces."
Colortone AV's Joe Lemischak adds: "They had an old distributed system that had probably been installed when the room was built."
According to Traci Centofanti, Mannkind's director of information technology, the room has long been problematic. "The system that was in here originally never quite did what it was intended to do," Centofonti says. "The coverage was very spotty - some places in the room sounded okay, but if you moved a few feet over, you could barely make out what the presenter was saying."
The solution was easily realised with a single pair of Renkus-Heinz Iconyx digitally steered array loudspeakers. Dual ICX7-II stacks on either side of one wall can easily provide even coverage all the way to the back of the room.
"We had the columns custom-painted in metallic gray to match the room," says Lemischak. "You can barely see them." Custom mounts were designed to integrate the columns with the room's existing structure.
Centofanti says the improvement was immediate and dramatic. "We've had numerous comments from people about the difference in the way things sound in there now," she observes. "People are more involved and more attentive in presentations - they can finally hear what's being said."
(Jim Evans)
