DasanSR provides SR system for Korea’s first acoustically conditioned hall

Published: ASIA

DasanSR provides SR system for Korea’s first acoustically conditioned hall

KOREA: DasanSR has completed an extensive installation at the Far East Broadcasting Station’s new company building. The team designed and constructed sound reinforcement systems that were fitted into the broadcaster’s art hall, music studio, chapel, practice room, waiting room, main conference room, and cafeteria.

‘We conducted the whole sound design concept based on the SR and reverberation system’s ability to deal flexibly with the character of the hall, which is host to various performances from speech to classical performance, choir, rock bands and a recording system,’ said Park Ilhwan, director of DasanSR’s SI team. ‘Accordingly, we constructed serviceable infrastructure and equipment to produce the various content, and created an interlocking design between the art hall and studio through Madi signal sharing, allowing the big stage of the art hall to be used as a big recording booth.’

For the art hall installation, a 460-capacity venue, DasanSR opted to install six of EAW’s smallest powered line array speakers, the NTL720, on each side of the hall connected to two NTS250 subwoofers. The NTL720 is a 3-way cabinet with three individual Class-D amplifiers that utilises DSP through the use of U-NET.

Additionally in the hall, eight EAW MW12 speakers were used for monitoring, and four JF80z were used as delay speakers, which were driven by Powersoft’s M30D. A DiGiCo SD8 was installed as the FOH console, alongside XTA’s DS8000 microphone distributor, and Avalon Design’s AD 2022 mic pre. The team also opted to install back-up analogue lines via a separate XLR patch bay throughout the hall to increase the system’s stability.

Song Wonsuk, manager of Far East Broadcasting’s technology team was very satisfied with the new system. ‘The acoustic properties of the hall were carefully designed to fit both its size and character, with Far East Broadcasting’s technical department working alongside DasanSR, who constantly evaluated and revised the work,’ he explained. ‘We requested an acoustic design that would work in partnership with the sound reinforcement system and that is what we now have, meaning we can host a broad range of shows and different events.’

‘The purpose of the system setup and tuning was to provide a clean and abundant SPL across the entire hall by adjusting the angle between speaker enclosures and the height and horizontal angle of the main speaker, in order to minimise the comb filter effect due to lateral reflection and maximise the sweet spot,’ said team leader Yoon Hyunchul of DasanSR, who was in charge of progress on site. ‘SPLs exceeding 95db were needed inside the art hall. We could compare our simulated results of 106db with the actual SPLs measured during the tuning process to achieve the best results.’

The biggest feature of the broadcasters new art hall is the new Yamaha AFC acoustic conditioning system, the first ever to be installed in Korea.

‘Yamaha AFC is a system which can optimise reverberation, maintaining natural musical environment in space and can improve the character the room’s acoustics,’ said Choi Changyu, head of sound labs at DasanSR. ‘The measured reverberation in the art hall was 0.7s, so the Yamaha AFC system was introduced to overcome the weak points in performance.’

The installed AFC adds reverberation up to a maximum of three seconds by utilising four microphones and 24 speakers installed on the ceiling. At the push of a button, the performance environment can be modified to accommodate various genres all in one place. Five reverb presets were configured for the room – 0.9s (speech), 1.6s (short time), 2.0s (mid time), 2.4s (mid-long time), and 3.0s (long time) – enabling appropriate and adjustable reverberation for the performances character.

The design of the music studio was based around the need to produce various types of content, such as record production, image dubbing, surround mixing, and live recording. The team installed a ProTools HD system combined with Millennia’s HV-3D 8-channel pre-amp was connected to Neve’s 5043 alongside a Masterbus Comp/Limiter, Portico Ⅱ Channel Strip EQ and Masterbus Reverb. Audio Signals from both the art hall and music studio are connected through the Digico SD8 using Avid’s HD Madi I/O. The system was designed to use 64 I/O channels with various routing depending on the situation.

In the chapel DasanSR set up EAW’s JF10 as the main speaker, VFM129 as a monitor speaker, and an MK8126i as a delay speaker. The main speaker was driven by Powersoft’s M30Da and accom with an Avalon Design AD2022 providing additional mic pres.

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