The new Queen Silvia Concert Hall on the campus of Lilla Akademien, a music school in Stockholm, Sweden that serves as a small performance space for professional live music concerts, a rehearsal room for students and a setting for creative learning, is outfitted with a sound reinforcement system utilizing Genelec Smart IP loudspeakers deployed by Sweden-based integration firm Informationsteknik.
Lilla Akademien artistic advisor Mark Tatlow explains, “We wanted to give students – and everyone who performs in the hall – somewhere to truly immerse themselves in their instrument. For that, we needed a sound system that would work for live classical music performed acoustically as well as for electroacoustic music and live-streamed concerts.”
Italian architect Giorgio Palù provided the hall’s design aesthetics and left the venue’s acoustics in the hands of Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. The unusual layout of the space required close collaboration from a team of international professionals across a range of disciplines.
Marcus Haraldsson Boij, technical director of the Informationsteknik team, notes the challenges: “Despite the relatively small 300-seat capacity, this is one of the most complex projects I have been involved in. The combination of a centrally located stage, the long reverberation time of acoustic classical music – and a design requirement to minimize the number of visible loudspeakers – made it very interesting from an acoustic design point of view!
“We needed to distribute high-quality sound close to the audience without it playing louder than the reverb,” he continues. “Without a traditional ‘left/right’ stage and with the audience seated at three different levels surrounding the orchestra, it demanded a different way of thinking – and while I wanted more speakers, it simply wasn’t possible given the design of the hall.”
To limit the amount of sound bouncing around the room, it was important to reduce the volume from the Genelec Smart IP loudspeakers. “By positioning them around the space,” Boij explains, “we avoided using a traditional line array system, which would have been too obtrusive in this setting. Instead, we created a unique distributed sound system which utilized the volume of the entire hall while still giving the audience a sound that felt both rich and intimate.”
Informationsteknik specified 22 Smart IP 4420 models and four 4430s. Painted in RAL 1036 gold, the 4430s are the only visible loudspeakers of the entire installation. Two pairs are suspended below the first level balcony, blending with the décor. Additional pairs of the compact 4420s are installed every few meters across each section of the curved wall in between the windows, hidden in specially insulated recessed boxes.
“We knew that with the way the walls were constructed, and the design requirements imposed upon us, pulling cables was going to be a problem,”says Boij. “Consequently, the Smart IP active loudspeaker family was the perfect choice since this avoided having to worry about housing external amplifiers – and Smart IP’s single cable technology made cabling much easier. It was a great solution for us.”
