Nestling within La Gaîté-Lyrique in Paris, the Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) Studios have been equipped with a pair of the newly released Amadeus Philharmonia reference loudspeakers.
The new loudspeaker monitors were installed in time for producers and mixing/recording engineers attending the latest edition of the Red Bull Music Academy – a world-wide travelling series of music workshops and festivals, offering ‘a platform for creatives working in today’s musical landscape’.
More than 60 participants from 37 countries were invited to Paris to work on music together in a collaborative environment in the state-of-the-art recording facilities within La Gaité-Lyrique – a digital arts and modern music centre opened by the City of Paris in December 2010. RBMA brought French music icons Jean-Michel Jarre, Laurent Garnier, Nicolas Godin and Marc Cerrone together with the participants.
Based in France, Amadeus has become one of the premiere manufacturers of custom studio speakers, as well as high-end sound reinforcement systems for live and installed sound. This is the second install of Philharmonia in Paris, joining the Philharmonie de Paris recording and mastering studios. The Philharmonia speakers were designed by Amadeus R&D Director Michel Deluc, with world-renown architect Jean Nouvel, who designed the new Philharmonie de Paris concert hall building complex.
‘Philharmonia is an innovative, intoxicating and uncompromising speaker system, which offers experienced mixing engineers a terrific monitoring tool capable of making sublime recordings,’ says La Gaîté-Lyrique Sound Department Director and mixing engineer Jean Marc Harel. ‘I am able to perceive and distinguish the intrinsic characteristics of the greatest monitoring systems – timbral transparency, extended bandwidth, perfect impulse response, wide and accurate stereo image, outstanding layering of sound planes – all crowned by remarkable dynamics.’</p>\r\n<p>‘It is a brilliant and subtle mix of uncompromising research in the design and combination of components, combined with a perfect mastery of sound and style, orchestrated by passionate people at the forefront of design and innovation,’ adds La Gaîté-Lyrique mixing and recording engineer, Pierre Le Cardinal.
‘We are pleased that the Philharmonia speakers are appreciated and recognised both by users involved in the classical or symphonic music fields, as well as producers, mixers and recording engineers working on today’s popular electronic music,’ says Gaetan Byk, Marketing Manager at Amadeus.
Initially created specifically for the Philharmonie de Paris recording and mastering studios, Philharmonia two-way, self-powered speakers use a 28mm soft-domed tweeter and a custom 8-inch woofer, and boast analogue and digital inputs with a custom integrated DAC and an frequency response of 43Hz to 22kHz (±2dB). The cabinets are manufactured from layered Birch and stand 1.6m tall, containing the electronics inside the lower part of the speaker enclosure. Each cabinet is constructed of 547 wood veneers, accurately machined, aligned and glued, and has a hybrid laminar port using progressive termination for reproducing low frequencies. Machined into the wood material along the full height of the speaker system, the very low velocity port gives optimal linearity.
Philharmonia is bi-amplified using two dedicated very high resonance digital custom-built amplifiers, each amp delivers 700W into 8?. These proprietary PPM-PWM fixed0frequency class-D amplifiers are equipped with a high-efficiency switched mode power supply. Each speaker channel is controlled by a 64-bit digital processing unit capable of an 118dB dynamic range. Each of these onboard DSP units includes a module dedicated to managing core system parameters, including system EQ, time alignment, limiting and transducer thermal protection.
The Philharmonia design also integrates analogue XLR inputs with two AES3 digital inputs/outputs. All inputs are coupled with a high-resolution 96kHz, 24-bit converter placed as close as possible to the electronic amplifiers. The speakers also feature an RJ-45 network input allowing remote control of its DSP processor for adjustment via dedicated software to match the speakers to the acoustical properties of each listening space. The software is an app that runs on Apple Macintosh and iPad, and Microsoft Windows computers.
