De Factorij with Beckhoff.

The Belgian national airport: Everybody calls it Brussels Airport, although the airport is located in Zaventem. Thinking about that, we are not going to call this new theater Brussels Cultural Center. Brussels is not big enough to capture the scope of this state-of-the-art venue.

Challenge

‘De Factorij’ has a multipurpose hall and a theater with 680 seats. The acoustic consultant designed a nearly perfect acoustic environment for speech and music.

The shape of the theater contains some challenges for sound reinforcement. It is fairly wide, high and not very deep, with high and steep seating. An eight-by-two-meter glass window is centrally positioned between the stalls and the balcony. The window serves as sound insulation for the control and projection room. The balcony has small aisles next to the side walls of the venue, placing a small number of audience members very close to the stage. Designing a line array for this style of theater was extremely difficult.

Requirements for integration

‘De Factorij’ utilized the d&b audiotechnik R1 V2 Remote control software as a ‘fast and efficient’ way to control the complete system. Combined with Dante Controller for changing the audio patch, it is a neat solution.

Audio solution

The first designs for ‘de Factorij’ were made just when d&b launched ArrayProcessing. With ArrayProcessing enabled, the level at the glass surface can be reduced to avoid reflections, and tonality remains constant throughout the steeply raked audience area. A Dante network provides audio signal transport throughout the venue. Amptec installed a cinema sound processor to provide DTS surround sound to reach the Dante network, and in one way or another, all consoles and amplifiers are connected to the redundant CISCO switches and four d&b DS10 Audio network bridges.

Integration solutions using Beckhoff

For Amptec, ‘fast and efficient’ meant an additional touchscreen solution that allows simple preset recall with an industrial PLC from Beckhoff. A speech or a movie projection can be activated by a touch on the screen. Recallable presets include amplifier settings and Dante patch presets. This touchscreen interface is programmed in HTML5. Presets can even be activated through a web browser on a martphone. Dante patch presets are prepared in Dante Controller and exported to the PLC with a USB stick. d&b amplifier presets are stored on board the amplifier and recalled by the PLC through OCA/AES70 or GPIO.