Arup's acoustician Tan Suan Wee drew on his own live sound background when designing the sound reinforcement system for the elegant concert hall. Two systems were able to meet the precise specification, which demanded much in terms of scalability, portability, directional control, clarity and musicality, and, of course, budget. For this high-profile concert venue, the choice came down to a Nexo Geo S12 line array design, with RS15 subs, PS8 front-fill cabinets, and power and processing from NXAMPs.
Arup has built great acoustical flexibility into the space - moveable choir stalls that can track forward allow the stage size to be reduced, creating more intimate platform settings; variable acoustic elements in the Hall enable the reverberance to be reduced without losing clarity. "SOTA had very definite ideas about how the facilities of the school should perform," says Tan Suan Wee. "The acoustic challenge is to accommodate such a wide repertoire, and we needed to design and specify a sound reinforcement solution that was itself versatile and complementary to the acoustics of the concert hall."
Arup has taken a scalable system approach by implementing modular sub-systems. In the concert hall, the Nexo Geo S12 loudspeakers are installed in a L/C/R configuration. Left and right hangs carry four Geo S1210 with a GEO S1230 down-fill; they can be rigged onto the loudspeaker hoist on demand, or de-rigged, to serve in another part of the SOTA campus. A centre cluster of three Geo 1230s side-by-side can be interfaced with the L/R rig, or used standalone, when the production calls for a clean (no speakers on show) aesthetic in the concert hall.
SOTA's system was supplied through Yamaha Music (Asia), Nexo's distributor in Singapore, where Lawrence Tan of the PA/CA Marketing Group has overseen the project.
"We've had very good support from Yamaha," says Suan Wee. "They've provided a very strong service, timely delivery and excellent planning. They've been backed up by the Nexo factory, with Nicolas Kirsch and Scott Mason dedicated to the SOTA project. The factory did its own modelling of our original design, a case of due diligence by a manufacturer that is quite rare! It's good that both parties reached the same conclusions.
"SOTA has already hosted the Singapore Arts Festival, which saw the system being used for different musical styles and both the venue staff and ourselves are very satisfied with the outcome. The project has particular requirements in terms of the sound reinforcement system and, in this situation, I believe it's the most appropriate tool for the application."
(Jim Evans)
