A recent renovation of the Tokyo office buildings of the Ikegami Tsushinki Co., a manufacturer of quality professional broadcast equipment that’s celebrating its 75th anniversary, includes the establishment of a sophisticated new seminar room equipped with Smart IP loudspeakers from Genelec.
The world of broadcasting is in the midst of significant change with the advent of Internet broadcasting with IP transmission. Ikegami is actively pursuing its development along these lines to accompany traditional terrestrial broadcast techniques, and the choice of the Smart IP loudspeakers for the new seminar room underlines the company’s commitment to developing IP workflows.
Akiko Kurazumi, manager of the General Affairs Group within Ikegami, notes that the company didn’t have many large rooms to hold company events until now. “We used to rent nearby public facilities for training sessions or other corporate events,” she says. “When the pandemic hit, we were obliged to move things online, but the idea was raised of having our own facility for the future. The timing was perfect as it coincided with the office renovations, so we built a new seminar room.”
During the design process, Ikegami consulted long-standing business colleague Tetsushi Hirai of TXA Planning, who offered a proposal based on the theme of “Staying focused on the seminar.” “I make it a rule to design sound systems that place intelligible audio exactly where it should be so that audiences and participants can concentrate on the content and get the most from their experience,” explains Hirai. “Ikegami’s seminar room was no exception.”
The design was developed from an attendee perspective: the rectangular room has been configured with six separate audio zones and designed in such a way that the speaker’s voice can be heard clearly from anywhere in the room with no interference between zones. Hirai says that the Smart IP loudspeakers offered an optimum means to achieve this design.
“The room features a number of physical pillars, so we installed a total of six 4430 loudspeakers in a left-center-right configuration for the front half of the room and the same for the back half, to deliver audio to each of the six zones,” notes Hirai. “The speakers are angled radially towards the center of each zone. The large display panels are also an important part of the experience, so the system has been configured in such a way that sound appears to be coming from the display where appropriate, which is placed close to the speaker for a realistic experience.
“We defined the center 4430 above the screens as the virtual sound source and calculated the time alignment for each loudspeaker position using 3D modelling software,” he continues. “Amazingly, once the time alignment was set, the sound output was so good, I didn’t even need to calibrate the loudspeakers – they sounded fantastic straight out of the box.”
The other motivation for using Smart IP is that the technology is the right fit for a company like Ikegami. “Ikegami is paving the way with the adoption of standards and technologies like ST 2110 which enables audio, video and control data transport, and is also developing MoIP (Media over IP) which incorporates remote control capabilities,” he says. “Genelec’s Smart IP platform that delivers audio, power and control via a single network cable fits right into that scenario and is a future-proof solution that will be able to adapt to new generation innovations.”
