The Mills Room, an ornate conferencing space at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia was recently outfitted with a new sound reinforcement approach utilizing Renkus-Heinz digitally steerable loudspeakers in support of meetings that include hosting high-ranking members of the country’s government.
The conferencing space features Tasmanian blackwood woodworking and is capable of hosting up to 54 people. Located in the ANU Chancelry Tower, due to both the room’s unique design and the fact that is has served as the location of significant ANU meetings since 1964, it’s deemed by the university to have heritage significance.
“Because the space was deemed to be of heritage importance we were given the directive of no substantive changes to the room,” explains Christopher Watson, consultant with Alder Technology – the firm that designed and specified the system for ANU. “The space itself is roughly 17 by 12 meters in size, and it has a massively vaulted ceiling. It’s also made of solid concrete, with a floating wall existing on one side. Simply put, the acoustics in the room were very poor and would present a challenge.”
Watson said the needs to precisely position audio in the space, coupled with the need to install as little as possible to ensure the space was architecturally preserved, led him to Renkus-Heinz. “Renkus-Heinz is a great audio solution for any space because of its quality, but when you have a lot of challenges in an install, the products they make really show their strengths,” Watson notes. “With Renkus-Heinz we’re now looking at a room that looks aesthetically balanced and has sound characteristics that are performance worthy. No need for pendants or ceiling speakers, just perfect sound with two steerable arrays.”
The installation makes use of two Renkus-Heinz IC8 loudspeakers installed at the front of the room on the “floating wall.” Part of the ICONYX line, the IC8s help in digitally positioning sound on the audience and off the peculiarities of the room. Further, due to their compact footprint and the utilization of Audinate’s Dante audio-over-IP protocol, the loudspeakers were installed without impacting the historically important architecture.
“We really like to talk about the audio capabilities of Renkus-Heinz,” says Lucas Catanese, Project Manager at MNGD, the integrator on the project. “But we also know there are installations where architects want to maintain a certain look and feel. This location, obviously, had a very important reason to do that. Renkus-Heinz allowed us to still integrate a system everyone loves while balancing the needs of the heritage space.”
“We’ve already installed it in two additional spaces,” Catanese adds. “They’re installed in a theater and an operations center where they’d had challenges with audio in the past. With the upgrade to the Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers, they sound great.”
