Designing a space to accommodate large groups of people and provide clear, natural sound has challenged architects and engineers for centuries. As a result, success has often been due more to good fortune than good science.
Building on over three decades of research and experience, Bose is able to offer unique solutions to this age-old dilemma.
Case Study - QUT Kelvin Grove Campus
Quality sound for quality education
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Venue
QUT is one of Australia’s largest universities, where approximately 40,000 students are currently enrolled in a variety of courses. The Kelvin Grove campus is located just north of Brisbane city on a beautiful hilltop. Its newest lecture facility is a showpiece for QUT. The room is treated for high acoustic performance, creating a pleasant ambience, blocking outside noise and delivering the best possible performance from the sound system.
Challenge
The university required quality speech reproduction as well as full AV playback to allow video and music to be experienced in 7.1 surround sound. The surround sound requirements were very difficult to achieve in a room that was laid out like a typical fan shaped lecture theatre with steeply raked seating. It was particularly difficult to deliver consistent volume and sound quality to every seat from all seven surround channels.
Solution
In order to achieve this, the acoustic consultant relied heavily on Panaray® MA12 Modular Line Array loudspeakers. This loudspeaker has a unique dispersion pattern which, unlike the spherical dispersion of a conventional loudspeaker, radiates the sound in a wedge shaped pattern. This allowed the majority of the sound to be contained at the listeners’ ear height and not radiate into unwanted areas of the room. In addition to this, the sound level produced reduces at only half the rate of a normal loudspeaker over a set distance which creates a far more even sound field for listeners. These important features were integral in the success of this system.
The Panaray MA12 loudspeakers are a 1m high cylindrical array speaker but can be stacked in order to increase their vertical coverage pattern. Multiple stacking of Panaray MA12 loudspeakers in this application allowed full coverage of all seats in the auditorium despite the steep rake angle. The loudspeakers on the side wall were tilted at the same angle as the seating which maintains the sound field at the correct listener height over all of the seats.
The system was augmented with a third party ceiling mounted speaker for the centre surround channel and a flush mounted active sub woofer in the ceiling for low frequency sound effects.
Result
The Panaray® MA12 loudspeakers perform extremely well in this lecture theatre. The custom design ensures that there are no acoustic dead spots and that quality 7.1 surround sound is heard in every seat of the theatre.
