One of Lithuania’s oldest museums, Vytautas the Great War Museum in Kaunas is a focal point for sharing the country’s history. The museum offers guided tours and education programs, with audio taking a key part in the learning experience. While visually striking, the museum’s 1930s Art Deco style and early functionalism architecture create a highly reflective interior with challenging acoustics.

The museum recently turned to beam-steering technology from Renkus-Heinz to provide the optimum sound for its visitor experience.

In addition to its tours, the museum hosts special events including commemorations, presentations and honour ceremonies. For these more extensive uses, flexibility and speech intelligibility are paramount.

The museum’s management contacted local A/V integration firm Audiotonas to design and install the new loudspeaker system. With the priority of significantly increasing sound quality, coverage and spoken-word intelligibility, the integration team specified and installed a pair of ICLive X Series beam-steering arrays from Renkus-Heinz.

Vytautas Stasiukaitis, Head of Sales at Audiotonas, says that the museum’s interior has many audio-reflective surfaces, including glass displays, hard walls, floors and ceilings, such as many old buildings have. ‘The old sound system was a four-speaker, point-source design, which was not well-suited for the venue,’ he explains. ‘After we understood what they wanted to accomplish, we demonstrated a set of Renkus-Heinz ICLive X arrays on-site, and the client was immediately impressed with what the system could do.’

The small-footprint Iconyx ICLive X Series makes it the most versatile, steerable line array currently on the market. The system’s integrated technology features multichannel class-D digital amplifiers with DSP engines to control every array element with programmable precision.

‘Audience size for events can range from 20 to more than 200; the system needs to deliver an immersive experience for the whole audience,’ Stasiukaitis says. ‘The acoustic properties of the venue are very challenging; without proper control, the reverberation is unbearable. The ICLive X Series can be easily and quickly configured for any situation, and the client is very pleased with its flexibility and the straightforward usability of the Rhaon software.

More: www.renkus-heinz.com