It took nearly 50 years for the building to be completely restored and nowadays its magnificent 300 seat ballroom is the setting for events of national importance, while a 180-seat concert hall hosts lectures, conferences and live music performances. In both venues, high speech intelligibility is an essential requirement. This is complicated by the ballroom's restored 18th-centurygrandeur featuring a polished wood floor, mirrored and marble surfaces and many windows.
Leading Polish acoustician Tadeusz Fidecki received a research grant from the Ministry of Science and Education for a project to improve speech intelligibility, with equipment supplier and system integrator M. Ostrowski Company tasked with providing system design and installation.
A team headed by project and design manager Michal Poplawski and Tomasz Rudzki, technician at The Fryderyk Chopin University of Music, specified a CobraNetdigital system because of the long cable runs between the halls, control rooms and main system rack. CobraNet also allowed for versatile routing - multiple combination panels in each hall making patching-in simple, with two mobile equipment racks providing great flexibility.
A/D conversion for the analogue I/O is done by Yamaha DME8-iC and DME8-oC digital processors, with redundant HP switches routing signals to all locations, allowing a Yamaha LS9-16 digital mixing console to be connected in each hall or the control room, two floors above the halls. Both consoles are also fitted with MY-16Cii interface cards. A Yamaha DME24N digital mixing engine, also fitted with an MY-16Cii card, also features in the system. It can work in either standalone mode or with the digital network, with every DME24N input channel able to be routed to the LS9 mixing consoles. The DME24N also handles routing for a mobile 5.1 system.
Remote laptop control of the consoles is provided via a dedicated Wi-Fi network, using Yamaha Studio Manager software. Audio can be recorded via an RME Fireface 800,or with MP3 compression on a USB memory stick direct from the desks.
"The system can be configured with both local and remote processing in each hall depending on the requirements of each event - it's exceptionally flexible, "says Michal Poplawski. "Theaudio team at the Royal Castle is very happy with the outcome and is satisfied that it will meet their needs for years to come."
(Jim Evans)
