The hall, used for exams, meetings, assemblies, lectures and the occasional celebrity visitor such as the Dalai Lama, is the largest space on the university campus. It can seat more than 1,000 students for examination: 650 in the primary space and a further 400 in an extension behind a moveable wall. The university was looking for a system with clear intelligibility as it will mainly be used for speech applications.
The system was designed and installed by a team of local Swiss specialists, who have since collaborated on projects such as the recent Nexo upgrade at Lausanne's Stade Olympique de la Pontaise. Acoustic consultant AER specified the system which was installed by Auditech, while Nexo's Swiss distributor ZAP Audio, which supplied the equipment, assisted with system design using Nexo's NS-1 proprietary software. The new system is driven by Nexo NXAMP4x1 amplification.
The team came up with a design which is effectively three mono systems summed together. Each of the three clusters consists of four Geo S8 cabinets: three S805 and one S830, plus one LS400 sub running in cardioid mode to cut down reflection off the rear wall. The clusters are flown at a height of nine metres to minimise the visual profile of the equipment, and can project 30m to the back of the room. The room can be divided into two separate spaces by moveable walls. The larger room, which occupies two thirds of the total, has three moveable screens, with another two in the smaller space. The loudspeaker arrays have to fly above them; another reason for flying them at height. The rooms can also run on their own separate EtherSound networks by quickly reconfiguring the main ring serving the total space.
Together with Yamaha LS9 audio mixers, networked Yamaha DME24s and Auvitran AVM500s also supplied by ZAP, Lausanne University's primary space is now optimised for its academic and informational uses.
(Jim Evans)
