The venue is the largest of the halls in the World Trade Center Rotterdam, measuring 35m x 26m, with a capacity for about 1000 delegates. It has always been regarded as a difficult acoustic environment, being a very reverberant hall with marble floors. The installation was carried out in cooperation with Dutch Television Services by Frits Baan, owner of the in Huizen-based company STB, and supported by Iemke Roos, Nexo's distributor in the Netherlands. Bert Koenders of Iemke Roos explains how Geo S was snapped up: "Together with Frits Baan, we prepared a quotation using Nexo's Geo Soft package, and then did a demo on-site; the system was sold that same day." The nearest competitive quotation for the project was twice the price of STB's tender.
Two clusters of Geo S, each featuring five S805 and one S830 have been fixed at the back of the hall. "The Geo S modules have such good projection and such tight dispersion that the reflections could be kept to a minimum," explains Koenders. "Even with relatively few speaker cabinets, the coverage is even and clear across a large audience area."
Just just one Camco Vortex 6 digital amplifier amplifies the system and two Nexo PS8s are used on stage as floor monitors. Making up the smallest and lightest arrays available today, the S805 and S830 are compact, high output full range loudspeakers. Each has an 8" hi-flux neodymium cone transducer reproducing frequencies to 60 Hz while the 1" neodymium compression driver, loaded with a patented Geo wavesource, is flat to 20 kHz. Using patented GEO technology, each module has a virtual source behind the cabinet, allowing multiple GEO loudspeakers to couple with no acoustic interference and behave like a single source. Consistent front-to-rear SPL, improved coherency, efficient zone separation and minimal reverberation from reflective surfaces are some of the major performance advantages of the new system.
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
