The Australian Defence Forces Academy (ADFA) in Canberra recently opened auditorium to host conferences and presentations. The premises can be used as a single 1,200 seat venue or two smaller 800 seat and 400 seat spaces respectively. For its audio needs L-Acoustics Kiva line array speakers were chosen by consultant GUZ BOX design + audio.
Tim McCall, sales manager at L-Acoustics noted the consultant’s involvement with the project: “Consultant GUZ BOX design + audio was brought in to design the audio system for the new space. The requirement was primarily for a system to provide vocal reinforcement, presentation sound and background music on a limited audio budget and with minimal visual impact. So it needed to be as compact as possible both in terms of both sizing and cost.â€
He also talked about the scope of the project: “As a fairly large space, the system needed to be able to cover the entire seated audience, both in combined mode and separate mode. And as it’s primarily a lecture theatre, good intelligibility in every seat was vital.â€
Gerry Gavros, brand manager for pro and commercial audio at Hills, L-acoustic distributors in Australia, said: “We were requested to re-address the sound reinforcement solution and look at an alternative to the single enclosure distributed loudspeaker system. We chose to submit an L-Acoustics system for consideration and our design team worked closely with L-Acoustics’ application engineers to offer a variable curvature line array solution.â€
Hills specified an L-Acoustics Kiva system to provide a flexible audio solution. The final design comprised three arrays of six Kiva cabinets topped with a SB15M sub. The arrays are powered and controlled by a single L-Acoustics LA4X amplified controller. This allowed for combined control of the arrays when the venue is in combined mode, whilst allowing each array to address distinct areas of the auditorium when it is in separate mode.
Damien Jhusaz, technical support engineer at Hills, said: “Tim Kuschel from GUZ BOX design + audio measured the system’s speech intelligibility on the last day of tuning/calibration and the values measured – which had an average STI (Speech Transmission Index) of 0.75 – were exactly in line with the predicted results. When you move through the room, it sounds exactly the same everywhere and this is an exceptional result, given the various constraints of the project.â€