NORTHRIDGE, California – New Zealand's oldest and largest public art gallery, the
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, recently underwent a massive restoration
that transformed the building into a world-class cultural facility that now
features a world-class audio system with HARMAN’s JBL loudspeakers. The upgrade
was designed and installed by two New Zealand-based companies, Jands and
Provision, working together to provide a networked audio system as part of the
AV upgrade.
Opening in
February 1888, the gallery has increasingly become a focal point of Auckland's
art scene, and now lies at the heart of the New Zealand art experience for both
the local community and visitors alike. Stephen Ward, project manager and lead
designer for the project, commented, "This project was unique, in that two
of the buildings we were cabling were Heritage Buildings over 100 years old,
and not linked, while demolition and construction continued around us. I was
able to draw from my knowledge and experience from working and maintaining
similar heritage sites in the UK, such as the Royal Society of Art and Tait
Britain to assist with the planning and implementation of this project,
allowing me the insight and understanding as to how the client would ideally
use the spaces.”
In total,
over 250 HARMAN JBL speakers were installed throughout the complex including
Control 26CT, Control 24C and JBL Control 52 satellite speakers.
One of the
design challenges was to provide an audio network with up to 25 discrete zones
and over 100 patchable inputs (four per zone), as well as a separate BGM and paging
level control per zone. Each of the 25 zones then needed the flexibility to be
virtually patched to any combination of other zones. Fortunately the BSS Audio
Soundweb London BLU-100 signal processors, featuring a 48-channel digital audio
bus, gave the flexibility required to make this work within the tight budget.
Ward
continued, "The audio was of high importance due to the changing nature of
the open spaces in the art gallery and varying exhibitions and the use of Soundweb
London allowed us complete flexibility in its design and linking. This provides
the ability to expand the AV systems in a modular way and meet the users ever
changing needs.”
Provision
went about installing 10 Soundweb London BLU-100 devices between the five AV
plant rooms. An audio network was setup between the plant rooms using fiber
optic cable, which linked the digital audio bus and Ethernet control.
The
mammoth task of mapping the level controls from 10 different Soundweb London
DSP devices began.
Logan
Bent, programmer for Provision with 15 years’ experience and dozens of existing
projects involving BSS Audio went about the task of integrating the whole
system. Logan comments, "The actual programming was relatively straight
forward once a clear scope of works and client discussions in developing the
interface were conducted. The most time consuming component during
implementation and commissioning was the grand scale of the project. The
greatest challenge with the interface was coming up with a way to overflow any
of the inputs to any of the output zones. Along with that a simple way to
disable a certain link was needed.”
For more
information on ProVision, please visit www.provision.co.nz
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