Designed largely with acoustics in mind, the Concertgebouw Brugge opened its doors in 2002, just in time to commence the Belgian city’s stint as Capital of European Culture. Since it’s opening the venue has attracted upwards of 150.000 visitors a year.
d&b partner Amptec and local integrator PVL Sound & Light originally installed a d&b sound system based on the Q and C-Series, which served the hall well for the best part of 18 years.
In 2019 the concert hall decided to upgrade, relying on Amptec’s expertise to once again come up with a suitable audio solution that would incorporate the latest digital and audio technologies available to improve the sound experience across the entire audience area without compromising the simplicity of use.
“Speech intelligibility was a crucial factor for us because next to music we also deliver conferences, comedy shows, speeches and so forth. We also wanted to achieve an equal coverage across the whole auditorium” says Audio Engineer at Concertgebouw, Mattias Debrabandere.
In addition to the above brief, the venue also asked to repurpose parts of their old PA, while freeing up the stage as much as possible.
Taking all these requests into account Amptec designed a sound system based around a d&b Y-Series line array with a flown xS-SUB array, V point sources as front fills and E-Series speakers as balcony delays.
An R90 touch screen remote control provides intuitive usability, supplying the venue with presets for pre-defined performance scenarios, making changeovers straight forward and efficient. Parts of the old system have been adapted for a smaller performance space used for chamber music, extending the life of the venue’s initial investment and complying with their sustainability program.
As the hall mainly hosts orchestral music performances the PA had to be flown higher than in other live performance venues, but by applying ArrayProcessing, the setup still manages to achieve an incredible coverage figure of 80% of the audience area in the main auditorium which seats up to 1289 people. E-Series delay speakers ensure the harder to reach areas are sufficiently covered as well.Steven Aerts, Technical Project Manager, Amptec
“The desired height of the line-array did not allow it to be supplemented with SUBs, but the free width of the draw meant we were able to add a flown SUB array. To keep visual impact of the system as minimal as possible we also supplied the VP front fills in the exact colour of the interior, making them virtually disappear” adds Frank Geerts, Sales Manager at Amptec.
Debrabandere is delighted with their continued choice of d&b.
“We have many international artists who perform at our venue and d&b is a well-respected name in international touring circuits. In the six months we used the system before we had to close our doors due to Covid19 not one production chose to fly their own rig, which is a great testament to the PA and to Amptec’s design. The feedback from our artistic management was also positive and we have not had any complaints from visitors about speech intelligibility.Mattias Debrabandere, Audio Engineer, Concertgebouw Brugge
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