The 315-seat Concert Hall, a chamber music venue, and a daily performance, tuition and rehearsal space for the school's use, is also available for hire for other music events and recording sessions.
Its construction was inspired by the death of the school's mentor Yehudi Menuhin in 1999, and was finally opened in January of this year. Lead Architect Mark Foley of Burrell Foley Fischer worked closely with the School's acoustician Bob Essert of Sound Space Design and theatre consultants Anne Minors Performance Consultants.
Marquee Audio was invited to join Sound Space Design, audio consultant Simon Kahn and the school team in drawing up an optimum AV specification for the new Hall. "The driving force behind the project was the school's wish to be able to record whatever takes place in the Hall," explains Marquee's Andy Huffer. "It has been designed as a realistic concert hall environment for performance and practice, as well as a commercially independent venue; our task was to provide a good audio infrastructure for all those uses, and also to give them a recording facility."
Because that recording facility could be required by any student or teacher, the interface was kept utterly simple; just one record button to be pressed on a keypad behind the rear wall of the stage area. The recording process takes place at the other end of the auditorium, in a small control room, where Andy Huffer has specified a customised audio PC using beyerdynamic's STENO-S software to capture CD-quality stereo recordings from a pair of microphones permanently installed in the hall.
"This is the first time we've used the STENO-S software," explains Huffer, "it was the only way of achieving what the client wanted, namely a reliable remote one-button start to recording, but this software also facilitates the export of files and burning of CDs." A pair of Tannoy Reveal active monitors and a Yamaha 01V96 mixer completes the set-up in the control room.
In the auditorium, Marquee has provided a high-quality projector with electric drop-down screen above the stage, ready for DVD and VHS playback. Using Marquee's custom-designed bracketry, a pair of KV2 Audio EX12 speakers has been discreetly installed behind the acoustic baffles which hold the screen, providing an auditorium sound reinforcement system when required.
Although the Menuhin Hall has its own in-house AV technician Brian Fifield, Marquee has kept the control interface for all devices as simple as possible. At the back of the stage, a basic 16-button keypad provides transport control for all the devices in the control room, the all-important record button, and the main control for the projector and screen.
Facilities panels have been installed all around the building, the majority of which carry multi-channel audio and CAT5 data lines. In total, there are 25 panels of varying size, dotted around front-of-house and backstage areas, in the dressing rooms, control room and auditorium. A dual control room position allows a choice between mixing from the sound booth or from the audience environment.
The system is tied together via a Cue control system, which interfaces to a BIAMP Nexia to handle all the DSP processing, carrying multiple audio inputs and feeds to the main speaker system. A default 'auto mode' ensures that all the Trantec radio microphones and playback devices are preset at a level optimised for the speakers. The system also interfaces to the beyerdynamic STENO-S software on the control room PC, and the source equipment. Marquee has also installed an Ampetronic induction loop system and Sennheiser infra-red system for hearing assistance.
According to Andy Huffer, Marquee Audio projects "tend to use equipment we're familiar wit
