Alongside its seven academic colleges of study, Australian National University (ANU) is uniquely connected to the Australian Government through its location across the Molongl River from Capital Hill in Canberra, where the parliament buildings are located.

The university frequeently hosts a high-profile meetings in its Mills Room, an ornate conferencing space featuring Tasmanian blackwood woodwork and capable of hosting up to 54 people. Located in the ANU Chancelry Tower, these meetings can include high-ranking members of the government, giving the room premiere status on campus. Its design and the fact that is has served as the location of significant ANU meetings since 1964, has seen it deemed by the university to have ‘heritage significance’.

However, after decades in service, the room was due for an A/V upgrade.

‘Because the space was deemed to be of heritage importance we were given the directive of no substantive changes to the room,’ says Alder Technology consultant – the firm that designed and specified the system for ANU. ‘The space itself is roughly 17m x 12m in size, and it has a massively vaulted ceiling. It’s also made of solid concrete, with a floating wall existing on one side. Simply put, the acoustics in the room were very poor and would present a challenge.’

Watson says the needs to precisely position audio in the space, coupled with the need to respects its architecture, led him immediately to Renkus-Heinz.

‘Renkus-Heinz is a great audio solution for any space because of quality, but when you have a lot of challenges in an install, the products they make really show their strengths,’ Watson says. ‘With Renkus-Heinz we’re now looking at a room that looks aesthetically balanced and has sound characteristics that are performance worthy. No need for pendants or ceiling speakers, just perfect sound with two steerable arrays.’

The installation makes use of two Renkus-Heinz IC8 digitally steerable line array loudspeaker systems installed at the front of the room on the ‘floating wall’. Part of the Iconyx line, the IC8s make use of Renkus-Heinz’ digitally steerable technology, allowing venues of all size and type to digitally position sound exactly where it is wanted.

The columns’ compact footprint and use of Audinate’s Dante AoIP protocol, allowed them to be installed without impacting the aesthetic the space.

‘We really like to talk about the audio capabilities of Renkus-Heinz,’ says Lucas Catanese, Project Manager at MNGD, the integrator behind the project. ‘But we also know there are installations where architects want to maintain a certain look and feel. This location, obviously, had a very important reason to do that. Renkus-Heinz allowed us to still integrate a system everyone loves while balancing the needs of the heritage space.’

The results of the Mills Room installation were sufficiently impressive, Catanese says, the university has made the IC8 a standard for audio upgrades in the future.

‘We’ve already installed it in two additional spaces,’ Catanese confirms, ‘in a theatre and an operations centre, where there had been challenges with audio in the past. With the upgrade to the Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers, they sound great.’

More: www.renkus-heinz.com