A children’s hospital in Kansas City is also home to a comprehensive pediatric medical centre, integrating clinical care and medical education. Within the campus is a 350-seat, multi-use auditorium for a range of presentations, lectures and large video conferences. Here, the hospital worked with St Louis-based technology systems integrator Coltrane Systems on the primary audio system and chose Renkus-Heinz for sound reinforcement.
According to Coltrane Systems Director of AV, Mike Dolan, the benefits of Renkus-Heinz were critical for the hospitals new space: ‘It’s an amazing space, and our primary challenge was keeping the ceiling and the entire space very clean. We were free to design and propose whatever we thought best, but the ceiling was off limits, and all the audio had to be as discreet as possible, and hopefully, virtually invisible.
‘Knowing we needed a high-calibre audio system with a small footprint, my first call was to our partners at Renkus-Heinz to help us understand the available options.’
The auditorium has a 23.81ft x 13.41ft screen built into the front wall with almost no space on either side. With traditional speaker hangs not an option, Dolan selected Renkus-Heinz Iconyx Compact Series 48/3 speakers that could be wall-mounted inside the small, but tall, space available on each side of the screen.
The ICC 48/3 offers additional solutions for integrators seeking flexible and powerful options in ‘medium-sized’ installations. With an amplifier and DSP channel for each driver, the flexibility of Iconyx is now available in a package with a nearly 40 per cent smaller footprint than the classic Iconyx.
‘The ICC 48/3 system fit the needs of the space perfectly,’ Dolan says. ‘We now have thin columns on each edge of the screen that are 13ft high but only about 5.5-inches wide. They essentially disappear. The architects about fell out of their chairs because they didn’t think we could come back with something that sounded so good and fit the space so perfectly – it met exactly what they were trying to accomplish.’
The Iconyx Compact Series design is available in four variants, ranging from 3.3ft (1m) to 13ft (4m). The longer columns provide excellent low-frequency control, an important consideration for applications where reverberation times peak at low frequencies. The longer columns also project coherent, highly intelligible sound for longer distances, negating the need for labour-intensive distributed systems in many applications.
‘The architect and the customer – and us frankly – are all thrilled with the results,’ Dolan reports. ‘You don’t know the speakers are there unless you know what you’re looking for. The audio is smooth and dynamic and carries to the back of the room in exactly the fashion we expected it to. Renkus-Heinz delivers true, genuine sound, and the compact ICC system is an absolutely perfect solution for this application.’
