Among Scandinavia’s largest congress centres, the Messe Center Herning location in Herning, mid Jutland, hosts conferences, sports events and rock concerts, for which it has installed a new d&b audiotechnik sound system,

The selection of d&b was made by a team of in-house and external professionals after presentations and listening tests. ‘We wanted a premium brand system that would be rider-friendly for both in-house and visiting engineers, so we asked a number of companies to tender,’ explains Messe Center Herning (MCH) Head of Sound, Tommas Hviid Kristensen. ‘Each company set up a mono hang of their system so that we could hear them in the theatre and then decide which we preferred.’

‘We had applied for the tender and had come along to the set-up day. However, we quickly discovered when we were setting up that our sound card had broken, and due to the reasonably remote location of the theatre, it was a long drive for us to get a replacement, which meant we had very little time left in our set up slot,’ adds Lars Baun Frederiksen, MD of Alfa Audio, d&b’s Denmark distributor. ‘We literally flew the speakers, gave the system one or two quick tweaks, then just enabled ArrayProcessing – it sounded fantastic. Everyone at the theatre was impressed at how easy it was to make the system sound good, straight out of the box.’

The installation was completed with the assistance of d&b’s ArrayProcessing line array optimisation tool. ‘There are a number of presets that you can use,’ Frederiksen says. ‘For example, you could tell the system to leave out the balcony, or perhaps you don’t need the sound to reach all the back rows if they’re empty. No other manufacturer has anything like ArrayProcessing, as it is extremely powerful yet easy to use.’

The new loudspeaker system comprises mainly the d&b Y-Series and delivers complete flexibility for reproducing speech and music. Each of the two arrays feature four Y8 and four Y12 loudspeakers. ‘We wanted to use the Y-Series throughout the install,’ Frederiksen says. ‘There was a requirement for more powerful subs – not just in one place – to provide a little more flexibility when more power is required for larger concerts. So we decided to use the V-Series subs and had some extra ones added that we could put stage left and right if required.’

The Y8 and Y12 loudspeakers share the same driver arrangement, with two 8-inch dipolar mounted drivers and a 1.4-inch HF driver combined with a central waveguide. Their advanced bass-reflex design delivers full bandwidth capabilities with an extended low-frequency output.

At the MCH Theatre the loudspeakers are driven by four D20 amplifiers for the Y8 and Y12s and a D80 amplifier for the subwoofers. Both four-channel devices contain extensive Digital Signal Processing capabilities to provide comprehensive loudspeaker management and specific switchable filter functions, enabling the user to accurately target the system response, whatever the requirements.

Two d&b DS10 Audio network bridges were also installed at the MCH Theatre – one at the FOH position and one at the amplifiers. DS10 makes it possible to input AES3 signals into the Dante stream, and to convert from Dante back to AES3 going into the amplifiers. It’s also simple to connect external consoles to the system via a Dante interface.

d&b’s ArrayCalc simulation software ensured optimum performance results for the theatre: ‘ArrayProcessing is calculated within the ArrayCalc software, which is regularly updated,’ Frederiksen says. ‘There are presets in the software that you can design, so the system can be optimized for speech or music, along with changing its level, level drop, areas to be excluded or adjusting reflections. The aim is to have the same optimum frequency response in all different areas of the hall. You can also remote control the whole system in the software too, via R1 running on the computer at the front of house. It’s so easy – once a customer has seen it, they are able to use it by themselves. It means there are no mistakes, since you can’t move crossover points, so the speaker system will always sound as good as possible.’