The main hall of the Muziekgebouw, which is due to open on 15 June, is an 800-seat auditorium featuring an electrically movable ceiling and rear stage wall, removable ground-level seating, and colour-changing, LED lighting built into its interior walls. All this provides a suitably unpredictable backdrop to the repertoire of avant-garde orchestral music that the hall is scheduled to host.Next-door to the Muziekgebouw, and contained within the same exterior shell, is the Bimhuis, a smaller, more informal hall with seating for 300, plus standing space and an open-plan bar area behind.
While big-name artists from Europe, the US and beyond are already scheduled to play at both halls, the building also offers a number of galleried performance spaces, café areas, outdoor seating, and the offices and music library of Gaudeamus, a Dutch contemporary music foundation.
TM Audio, XTA's exclusive distributor for Holland, designed and installed the AV infrastructure for both the Muziekgebouw and the Bimhuis. Project manager Reinier Bruijns specified six XTA DS800s for both halls, siting them at the monitor positions of each. "In both venues, the DS800s are used as the main splitter system," says Bruijns. "So for every concert, the DS800s do the active split between the FOH and monitor consoles, and provide both an active and a transformer-isolated split for OB trucks."
XTA's DS800 is an 8-input, 32-output mic/line distribution unit. It has its own power supply capable of working down to a mains voltage of 60V, and each channel provides two outputs that are actively balanced and accessible via rear-panel XLR connectors, along with two that are transformer-isolated and accessible via front-panel XLRs. As well as their current uses, the DS800s will also be used to provide isolated outputs to the recording studios that are being built for each venue, TM Audio having pre-wired the building with a multicore infrastructure for exactly this purpose.
(Lee Baldock)
