Named in deference to the region’s industrial heritage, De Factorij is a new cultural centre and performing arts facility in the Zaventem district near Brussels. Opened in 2017, it hosts a diverse programme of performances, exhibitions and events.

With quality, diversity and inclusivity at the heart of its remit, the venue’s management required ‘fast and efficient’ control of its technical systems – audio included. Already responsible for the cabling infrastructure, Belgian systems integrator and audio specialist Amptec was called on to design and install d&b audiotechnik sound reinforcement systems for the main theatre.

De Factorij’s main performance space is the 680-seat Ivo Maupertuis Theatre, a shell-shaped auditorium designed as an acoustically isolated box-in-box construction. Despite excellent natural acoustics, the room’s design presented challenges when it came to sound reinforcement. ‘As a venue, it’s quite unusual,’ Frank Geerts of Amptec says. ‘The auditorium is not very deep, but large and high, with very steep audience seating. And in the middle of that audience plane is the big window of the projector booth.’

Faced with these challenges, Amptec’s engineers chose a d&b Y-Series system, designing the initial configurations using d&b ArrayProcessing software. ‘Before ArrayProcessing was available, our experience with line arrays was that you can’t get an even frequency distribution in that kind of space; a point source system may have been the best solution,’ says Geerts, ‘But with ArrayProcessing, you have the guarantee that you will have the control needed to work around these issues with the space.’

‘There are some difficulties in the venue, because you have a projection space with a vertical wall, so we used the ArrayProcessing to get rid of the reflections there, and it really works,’ adds De Factorij’s Dries D’Hondt, himself an experienced live sound engineer.

With the design work still off-plan, ArrayProcessing was to prove invaluable. ‘The side balconies were another issue,’ Geerts continues. ‘These only seat eight each side, but they would be too close to the line array. We discovered that, with the right height of the line array, and with ArrayProcessing working to eliminate the glass window, we also reduced the level at those side-balcony positions. So we get a lower level at the balcony, we have control of the reflections at the window, and control of frequency distribution across the audience plane. All the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.’

In finalising the design and the final installation, the team at Amptec were supported by d&b at every stage. ‘On the design phase, we coordinated with d&b, to get a second opinion,’ Geerts says. ‘The guys from d&b Education & Application Support are really great with that. No two venues are the same; there are always considerations. It comes down to the experience that you have, so why not combine as much experience as you can?

The main Theatre system includes eight d&b Yi8, two Yi12 and three YiSubs in each main left and right hang, with additional low-frequency support from a pair of VG-Subs each side. Yi10P and Yi7P cabinets provide down fill and out fill, with E5 cabinets delivering front fill from the stage lip. The main system is powered by nine d&b 30D amplifiers. Also provided are 12 d&b M4 stage monitors.

While the d&b R1 remote interface is the primary control over the PA system, the venue’s ‘fast and efficient’ requirement meant an additional interface was necessary. Amptec’s solution involved a custom-designed touchscreen offering selection of simple presets drawn from an industrial PLC [Programmable Logic Controller] from automation specialist Beckhoff. This allows easy recall of audio set-ups for speech, or cinema projection, for example, including amplifier settings and Dante patch presets.

Amptec has been using Beckhoff PLCs for some years, adopting it as a controller that would sit outside of the signal chain. Geerts comments, ‘d&b consulted with us, because of our experience with these button control PLCs, on how to implement OCA for Beckhoff. So this was really a joint effort for d&b, Beckhoff and Amptec.’

Programmed in HTML5 by Amptec’s live sound installation team, the interface can also be accessed from a web browser on a mobile device. Dante patch presets are prepared in Dante Controller software and can be exported to the PLC using a USB stick. d&b amplifier presets are stored in the amplifier and recalled by the PLC through OCA (AES70) protocol or GPIO.

‘If you are a sound guy, you should work with the R1 remote control system; the rest of the world just press the preset button when they want sound,’ says Geerts.

For the cinema system, Amptec installed an additional surround system of ten d&b 8S loudspeakers powered by two d&b 10D amplifiers. A cinema sound processor provides Dolby or DTS surround sound to the Dante network. Consoles and amps are connected to redundant CISCO switches and four d&b DS10 audio network bridges.

Integrating automatic control of the cinema processor into the control network was another challenge: ‘We decided to have the cinema processor on the Dante network, but if you are the cinema technician, you don’t want to open your computer to have Dante Controller in front of you so that you can patch the cinema processor to the d&b amplifiers,’ says Geerts.

‘So we developed a Dante patch controller. The Beckhoff PLC also sends signals to the Dante network, through another interface, and like that, they have an automated cinema patch. So when they press the ‘cinema’ button, all the routing in the Dante network is done automatically. Go back to the PA presets, and all the routing is done again, automatically, to a left-right system.’

Dries D’Hondt is impressed with the new system: ‘It doesn’t happen a lot that people come up to the mixing console and say “Man, I never heard an orchestra sound like that”, but it’s happened here. Mostly, people don’t give credit to sound, but here, they have. It says a lot.

‘It’s a great-sounding system, in a really great hall. I think we are now the best-equipped venue in Belgium, so of course that must be true for Europe too.’