The Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main is among Germany's foremost educational establishments, with ambitions to be one of Europe's leading universities. Its current renovation and expansion plan on the Westend Campus site will take the total capacity of the campus from 10,000 students currently to around 45,000 by 2014.
Three new buildings, the House of Finance, the Rechts-und Wirtschaftswissenschaften (Law and economics) building and the Hörzaalzentrum (centre) have been completed and equipped with AV systems designed by Datech consulting's Detlef Hartmann and installed, following a project tender, by BFE under project manager Jörg Alberti.
Each building contains its own media network, with Peavey MediaMatrix Nion used for audio routing. The central lecture building houses two 1200-seat divisible rooms, along with four smaller lecture rooms, each seating some 300 students. Each room is equipped with Panasonic PTD 7000 projectors, Crestron QuickMedia media control solution and a pair of Renkus-Heinz IC16 digitally steerable array units. The arrays' digital beam steering capabilities are used to steer sound away from walls and ceilings to minimise reflections and maximise speech intelligibility.
In the privately-funded, marble-floored House of Finance are intimate, wood-panelled seminar rooms, some sponsored by individual financial institutions and each seating up to 70 students. These have horseshoe-shaped seating tiers, with each two or three students sharing a built-in beyerdynamic gooseneck conference microphone with a priority push button.
Each room is similarly equipped with left and right Renkus-Heinz IC16 active column arrays, also networked via the Peavey NION system, complementing the three lecturer-controlled Panasonic PTD7700s, with a large Crestron touch screen, keyboard and mouse and a visualiser. Sources include a Marantz flashcard audio recorder.
Similar but smaller rooms on the ground floor, including the Deutsche Bank room, are equipped with passive (mechanically steerable) Renkus-Heinz IC7 column arrays.
The new Law and Economics facility's nine seminar rooms are fitted with Renkus-Heinz IC7 columns, Panasonic PTD 7700 projectors, and 8" Crestron TPMC touch-panels. As with the rest of the site, the rooms are all networked via CobraNet / Nion and Crestron QuickMedia so that lectures can be bridged across more than one room, or the audio recorded on Marantz recorders.
Atlantic Audio's Wolfgang Garçon commented, "The Iconyx units are exceptionally useful in situations like this where you want to focus high quality sound very precisely."
(Jim Evans)
