The building of a new research and innovation hub—Skolkovo—was instituted while Dmitry Medvedev was still President of Russia.
“The intention was to sow the seeds of a Silicon Valley right here in Moscow,” explained Alexander Minkov of ARMO-GROUP, the company charged with developing the project.“Part of that development is Hypercube, the first building of the ‘Innograd’; Russian for ‘city of innovations’.”
Hypercube is an imposing concrete and glass edifice housing a main conference hall supported by several meeting rooms.
“We were charged with implementing the most innovative state of the art technologies within the centre,” continued Alexander Minkov, “and we spent considerable time researching modern conference audio systems for the best quality and reliability.”
The result of this careful research led to the choice of d&b audiotechnik equipment. At that point ARMO decided to implement the project with ARIS, the d&b audiotechnik distributor for the whole of Russia.
“It seems an obvious decision. The company has a good reputation for support, and profound expertise in the technologies required,” said Alexander Minkov.
Alexander Soloukhin, head of the Integrated Solutions department led the project from the ARIS side.
“This was a difficult acoustic environment and the conference room was to be used in three different modes: conference with simultaneous translation for two hundred delegates; educational purposes with full AV facilities and for music festivals with all the seating removed.”
The room was modeled extensively using d&b ArrayCalc simulation software before determining a system based on Q-Series with some elements from the T-Series.