A new sound reinforcement approach recently implemented for the 2,350-seat Great Hall at the Congress Centrum Suhl (Suhl, Thuringia, Germany) has an Amadeus Active Acoustics System feeding 74 existing ceiling-mounted loudspeakers now bolstered with 35 Renkus-Heinz CX61 compact 2-way Complex Conic loudspeakers on the walls.
MediasPro Medientechnik GmbH supplied the CX61s, which were selected due to their unobtrusiveness — recessed wall mounting was not possible, so the new loudspeakers had to be surface-mounted, yet not draw visual attention or disturb the hall’s aesthetics. The most significant selection factor, however, were the performance requirements for wide coverage and colorless sound.
The Complex Conic horns work with the spherical expansion of the acoustic pressure wave rather than forcing audio through a rectangular funnel. They are also stated to provide constant beamwidth, and as pattern control devices, they perform more optimally over a wider frequency band than ordinary horns. The wide 150-degree by 60-degree coverage provides proper dispersion of the reverberation signals.
Clearly, a system employing so many loudspeakers and microphones requires lots of signal transport and many channels of amplification. Installer CCS deployed an Audinate Dante network to carry all of the signals to and from the Amadeus Core processor at the heart of the system. Signals from the 14 Audio-Technica microphones run to an Attero Tech Synapse D16Mio Dante-networked audio interface, which puts the signals through 14 of its 16 mic preamplifiers before placing them on the network.
Signal outputs from the Amadeus Core flow to the loudspeaker array across the network. The signals are converted to analog by three Attero Tech unD32 Dante-networked interfaces, each of which features 32 analog outputs. The unD32 outputs feed 10 Bittner 8X100 power amplifiers, each of which offers eight channels of amplification.
“The Congress Centrum is quite pleased with the performance of our new reverberation enhancement system,” states CCS managing director Diana Schneider. “We have had many visitors tell us they had a special sound experience in the hall and thoroughly enjoyed hearing music there. I am grateful to everybody involved with the project for their very competent project design and implementation.”
