The City Concert Hall is an historic building housing several multipurpose rooms, including the 19th century 838-seat Great Hall, the new 349 seat Aalmarkt Hall and the 250 seat Bree Hall.
To coincide with the opening of the Aalmarkt Hall, new audio systems were installed in both the Great Hall and the Aalmarkt.
The objective was to expand the halls' ability to host a wide range of uses ranging from jazz and classical concerts and stage musicals to corporate presentations and lectures.
TM Audio project manager Reinier Bruijns explains that although the client's original tender had called for separate speech and music systems in the Aalmarkt Hall. "We felt an even better solution would be to combine the two functions in an IC Live system." He adds. "After we won the Government tender for that room, the hall management asked us to do something similar for their Great Hall, and we proposed a portable IC Live system, which they could then position on the stage wings when required, along with a pair of fixed IC Live cabinets for the balconies."
Bruijns adds, "We demonstrated it in the Great Hall, and showed the management how the IC Live system's digital beam steering could achieve accurate vertical beam angles to cover seats all the way to the back at 30 meters. At the same time the technology allowed us to keep reflections from the hard ceiling and rear wall.
"The other aspect that appealed to them was that, because IC Live was designed as a portable rental system, it's easy to store for classical shows and then takes just ten minutes to set up whenever sound reinforcement is required. The solution provides excellent acoustic control and high power from a compact system, and avoided the issue of needing to fly main or delay speakers in a room where that would be very undesirable aesthetically."
Four dual stacked ICL-R cabinets, linked via Ethercon cables, clip into place on top of the matching IC215S-R subwoofers to cover the main seating area, while a single ICL-R is mounted either side at the front of the balcony.
The system is routed via a MediaMatrix NION NX system over CobraNet, with RHAON (Renkus-Heinz Audio Operations Network) providing the final link in the chain. This also brought the benefit of minimizing cabling to a single Cat 5 cable and a mains cable to the self-powered and internally processed IC Live arrays.
In both the Great Hall and the Aalmarkt, simple presets on the NION laptop interface allow the balcony loudspeakers to be turned off when not required, and configure the main system for speech or music.
The new Aalmarkt Hall, a luxurious raked auditorium with huge side windows along the stage right wall overlooking a tree-lined canal, is finished in metallic gold, and the IC Live arrays - one either side for the lower auditorium and another either side for the balconies - were finished in gold at the Renkus-Heinz factory in California to match colour samples provided by the theatre.
TM Audio also supplied the back-of-house audio network, including an ASL intercom system, a paging and dressing room relay system with a Behringer Eurorack Pro RX1602 rack mixer, and TOA BS-1110 column speakers and PC1864 ceiling speakers, connected via TM Audio's proprietary Speaker Smart cabling.
Two assistive hearing systems were also supplied - one with user beltpacks comprising a Shure EP2T transmitter and 10 P2R receivers, and a Sennheiser induction loop system with EZT1011 headloops and PX20 headphones. The microphone package includes a selection of Shure and Sennheiser microphones.
(Jim Evans)
