Located about one hour's drive from Taichung City on the western flank of Taiwan's central mountainous region, the Taiwan Ling Yen Buddhist temple is set amongst beautiful mountain scenery in Puli township, Nantou County. It has recently been the subject of a comprehensive sound system installation comprising a range of Turbosound loudspeakers.
The specification for the new sound system at Ling Yen was put together by installation company Teamwork Co. Based in Taichung, the company is headed by Harry Chen and regularly works on audio projects all over the island. After extensive listening tests, Teamwork's offer won out, and with technical support from Turbosound distributor ProSound, project manager Chen and his team set about realising the project.
The final choice of individual loudspeaker models was down to the monks themselves. At Chen's suggestion of the Aspect TA-500 bi-amped three-way full range loudspeaker as the main component of the sound system design, and after listening to several options from the Turbosound range the monks confirmed their choice.
"The TA-500 is capable of delivering extreme clarity," says Chen, "and we wanted the sound to be as intelligible as possible in what is a fairly reverberant space with lots of hard surfaces. By locating the loudspeakers in the roof space and directing them downwards, we were able to achieve a very good transition to the secondary loudspeakers located in the walls of the main hall, and very good all-round coverage."
Augmenting the main TA-500 loudspeakers - of which there are a total of eight units installed in the ceiling of the main hall - is a combination of mainly TCS-122 passive two-way models, together with NuQ-12 passive two-ways, both comprising 12" low frequency drivers and 1" HF compression drivers on Converging Elliptical Waveguides.
"Although we initially specified all TCS-122 cabinets for the main hall, we just could not find enough room in the higher level of the main hall to fit some of the loudspeakers," explains Chen, "and so the obvious solution for the remainder was to substitute NuQ-12s - which are the same format, but with dimensions that better suited the available space."
Turbosound's Asia market manager Chris Gooddie confirms that the sound quality is well above everyone's expectations. "Sonically, the system is amazing," he says. "Sound comes at you from all sides but in a very unobtrusive way, and whichever way you are facing the sound character is the same. Teamwork has so impressed the monks that a further project in Taichung City is already scheduled, as well as at another Buddhist temple outside Taiwan."
(Jim Evans)
