Set in the Teutoburg Forest, the German city of Detmold is home to the KreativInstitut.Ostwestfalen-Lippe (KIO), which brings together digital media production, composition and sound design, digital humanities and music informatics, with artificial intelligence. The heart of KIO is the Spatial Audio & Arts Lab, a new facility using Genelec monitoring.
Located on the Kreativ Campus Detmold, the facility is a centre of science and research, and is shared by Paderborn University, Detmold University of Music and the OWL University of Applied Sciences and Arts. It is unique in Germany for its huge breadth of expertise.
‘For students, KIO offers enormous opportunities, as they can work with technologies that are rarely available together in one place,’ explains Sascha Etezazi, KIO’s Artistic Research Associate in Composition & Sound Design.
KIO’s Spatial Audio and Arts Lab (known as SAAL – a wordplay on the German word for ‘music hall’) functions as a high-resolution immersive monitoring room with a clear musical focus, allowing the mixing, production and presentation of content by students and researchers.
‘SAAL was designed as a high-resolution Ambisonics monitoring space, enabling full-spherical reproduction between the fifth and sixth order, and accommodates channel-based formats and common consumer formats such as Dolby Atmos,’ Etezazi says. Etezazi worked with Jörn Nettingsmeier, consultant for immersive electroacoustics/Ambisonics, on the design of room, with Nettingsmeier planning the truss structure, acoustic curtains and electroacoustics, Etezazi and his team defined the precise positioning and set-up of the monitoring system.
Etezazi’s previous experience with Genelec played a key part in the monitor selection process at SAAL: ‘I’ve used a pair of Genelec 8330 SAM monitors in my own home studio for some years now. Having worked with them extensively, I could see that the controlled directivity and compact design of Genelec near-fields were perfect for the room here at KIO, allowing us to position a large number of monitors flexibly.’
As a result, Etezazi and the KIO team specified a monitoring system comprising 43 Genelec 8030C two-way monitors – configured as a 360° spherical array measuring 7m × 6m × 3.8m – complemented by four 7050C subwoofers. ‘SAAL is a relatively large room, so we wanted to provide a wide listening area where several people can also listen comfortably while standing,’ Etezazi says.
The system design and concept result in a plug-and-play solution through the integration of common DAWs and playback systems. With its wide diversity of projects, KIO relies on a highly flexible infrastructure, enabling students to prepare mixes remotely and then set up their workstation directly in SAAL, connect to the playback system, and start working in a wide range of formats. Mixes created in the spatial room can then be experienced and evaluated elsewhere on campus – such as using a 3D headset with headphones.
With the room performing well acoustically, the KIO team found that each 8030’s rear panel room correction DIP switches were more than sufficient for optimising the entire system for the space. ‘Since the room acoustics are good, we found that the tonal adjustment of the 8030s using the DIP switches produces very good results – maintaining tonal balance all around – but with the option of using external room calibration systems if required.’
The creation of an engaging Ambisonics listening environment is something about which Etezazi is particularly passionate: ‘My background is as a Tonmeister, and my goal is for Ambisonics to be musically convincing rather than being perceivd as a scientific-technical format only,’ he says. ‘Many still associate it with a rather technical sound – or suffering from a very small listening sweet spot – but here, many people comment on how musical Ambisonics can actually sound. But crucially, putting technicalities aside, this Genelec system actually allows you to forget the playback format and simply enjoy the music.’
More: www.genelec.com