Designer Notebook: Inside EAW Anya

Robust Package
As the acoustic concept was refined, the technical details of the engineering requirements would guide the overall shape of the product. Specifically, we emphasized the functional form of the large, continuous and contiguous horn with premium materials and finishes in order to achieve a unique and distinctive appearance.

Continuing to use function to guide Anya’s design, the straight-line acoustic solution influenced the rigging system. For ease of use and to maintain functionality in horizontal arrays, the operational features of the rigging were strategically placed on the rear of the enclosure.

We also determined that in order to protect the enclosures during the rigging process, the structural elements of the rigging had to be retractable. The resulting precision engineered mechanisms within the module permit the user to complete the rigging connection between two modules in three quick steps with no loose hardware – pull the rigging slide to the open position, rotate and push a handle to lower the catch mechanisms, then push the rigging slide to return it to the locked/travel position.

The complexity of the rigging hidden within Anya allows for straightforward operation while providing the strength to suspend 18 modules with a 10:1 design factor.

As we considered simplifying other facets of using Anya, we included bright, reflective orange stripes on the rigging mechanisms to easily and definitively alert users if any aspect of the rigging process was overlooked. Additionally, heavy-duty pallets were designed to allow stacks of four modules with a fly bar to travel pre-rigged, reducing the overall number of rigging connections as well as load-in/load-out time.

Click for a larger view of Anya modules.

Power Plant
All that work on the physical package would have been pointless if we couldn’t deliver discrete processing to every element in the array. As noted earlier, each module contains 22 transducers, so it requires 22 channels of digital signal processing and amplification. The amplifier components were intentionally selected to match the power requirements of the devices we had developed.

The DSP, ancillary hardware, and associated algorithms (heavily evolved from those developed for KF900 and DSA) are all EAW, while the audio network and bidirectional communications are on the Dante platform. Anya is only possible due to the enormous leaps in DSP, amplification and networking, in terms of speed, power and size.