People are becoming increasingly used to everyday life featuring a high quality soundtrack. Digital audio technology has meant that cinemas, theatres, transport and home audio/visual systems feature powerful, crystal clear surround sound. Audiences at live concerts are beginning to enjoy an aural experience that’s almost as good as the artists’ recordings, while the development of ever-smaller, ever higher quality personal audio players means that excellence in sound can be carried anywhere.
Put simply, the public is now so used to high quality audio that it expects it. Venues, entertainment centres and public facilities can no longer be content to provide inferior sound - the demand for audio excellence is such that anything less than excellent sound quality is becoming simply unacceptable.
In recognising this ever-increasing demand, Yamaha Commercial Audio and its pan-European partners have recently achieved many major successes, many of them in challenging situations.
Perhaps one of the most challenging is in the vast space of the historic Lincoln Cathedral in eastern England. Distributing high quality audio accurately and equally throughout the cathedral is a major task, but one which Yamaha and Wigwam Acoustics have achieved with Yamaha’s digital mixing engines and 60 custom loudspeakers. Measuring just over two inches wide, each speaker is uniquely designed to fit unobtrusively into the contours of the historic pillar that it is attached to.
The result is a distributed audio system which is barely visible to the naked eye, yet delivers unsurpassed audio quality, every member of the congregation being near enough to a loudspeaker for the reflections off the cathedral’s many hard surfaces not to be an issue.
The backbone of the audio distribution system is Yamaha’s DME64N and DME24N mix engines, the cathedral now being home to the largest networked system in Europe to use DME technology.
The DMEs were chosen by Wigwam because the audio system had to be extremely versatile. Many different kinds of services and gatherings take place, each one requiring the audio to be distributed differently throughout this cavernous and labyrinthine building. Yet, despite being an extremely sophisticated network, the system has been designed to be operated from a single small control panel.
5.8 km of speaker cable and 3 km of signal and networking cable were required for the installation. Yet from commissioning to testing took just three months.
Also in England, one of the country’s leading entertainment venues is London’s Barbican. Performing the opening ceremony in 1982, Her Majesty the Queen described it as 'one of the wonders of the modern world'.
For 34 weeks of the year, the 1100 seat Barbican Theatre and its diminutive neighbour The Pit Theatre, act as a receiving house for leading international theatre and dance companies, with the remainder of the calendar being given over to corporate and education events.
The Barbican produces a wide range of shows, from opera and theatre to dance, pantomime and puppetry. The speed of turnaround between events also means that every possible option has to be available on site. This ability has recently been enhanced by the addition of a pair of Yamaha DME64N mix engines, along with M7CL-48 and 01V96 mixing consoles.
“The DME64N has a huge potential variety of uses with its on board facilities. We’re currently using it as a 40 x 32 switchable matrix for both analogue and AES-EBU I/O,” says the Barbican’s Senior Technical Manager, Steff Langley. “The great thing about the Yamaha gear is that the optional I/O cards are interchangeable, so I’m slowly building up a collection that we can use on the DMEs or the new mixers when we need to.”
In Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Finnkino Oy cinemas currently runs over 150 screens with many more in development. The company’s aim is to offer the very best cinema experience, so the supreme audio quality and reliability of Yamaha’s P series amplifiers have been a natural choice for its venues.
Several hundred P4500s and P7000S’s are already at work in the cinemas, with the company having recently invested in 95 Yamaha XP5000s from Swedish supplier F Musikki Oy, 50 for a five screen complex in Oulu, Finland’ and 45 more for another new complex in the Lithuanian town of Kaunas.
All of Finnkino’s complexes use custom-built loudspeaker systems, which the company has specially designed to ensure that the audio is optimised for each individual theatre.
“The sound quality of the amplifiers is superb and they are utterly noiseless. The design is excellent, they are very well built, they offer superb quality and power for the cost and the reliability is fantastic” says Finnkino’s Ari Saarinen. “We have never had a single failure in any of our installations.”
In Sweden, one of the country’s most prestigious theatres and one of its most progressive universities have benefited from Yamaha installations.
Stockholm Stadsteatern (City Theatre) received a comprehensive Yamaha audio system when it was given a significant technical overhaul a couple of years ago As you would expect from Yamaha, the equipment is working flawlessly and will do for years to come. Indeed, so successful was the installation that it received further Yamaha power amplifiers more recently.
The Stadsteatern building was built in 1990 and houses four halls (Halls 1-4) and a production studio. The theatre also manages three further halls elsewhere in Stockholm, known as Halls 5-7. At the heart of the Stadsteatern ethic is high technical production values and it’s for this reason that the halls rely almost exclusively on Yamaha equipment to deliver high quality, reliable audio.
Between them, the seven halls feature 19 Yamaha Digital Mixing Engines (two DME64N, three DME24N and 14 DME32), seven Yamaha mixing consoles (two DM2000, four DM1000 and one 02R96V2) and no less than 93 Yamaha power amplifiers, comprising 36 PC4800N, 30 PC4801N, 16 PC9500N and 11 PC9501N.
The Yamaha mixing engines are the key to the halls being able to offer extremely flexible audio options and full surround sound. In addition they provide all dynamics and equalisation processing, as well as main loudspeaker processing in Halls 1-3.
One of the unique characteristics of Stadsteatern is that, based on a show's success and popularity, it might be moved from one hall to another. The Yamaha mixing engines allow data to be easily transferred from one hall to another and even productions with a complex surround audio setup to be moved with surprisingly little effort.
To the south west of Stockholm, the 5500 students at the Norrköping campus of Linköping University are enjoying a brand new Student Union building, complete with Yamaha audio system.
Featuring a restaurant, café, pub, and a main hall with a stage for musical performances, the new facility is named ‘Trappan’ (The Stairway) and includes a Yamaha distributed audio system installed by Åke ”Myggan” Wennersten of PADAB Ljud & Ljus AB. Åke is a senior and successful Yamaha contractor in Scandinavia, with a huge number of projects behind him. These include the Gothenburg City Theatre and the De Geer Concert House in Norrköping.
Featuring a DME24N Digital Mixing Engine, with four PC9501N and one P7000S power amplifiers driving four IF2115W/64 mid/highs, two IF2115W/95 mid/highs and four IS1218 subs, the system is installed in Trappan’s main hall and also sends signals to loudspeakers in a small bar behind the main hall, plus a bigger pub on a lower floor. There are also audio inputs located in the big pub, which can be broadcast through all the system’s loudspeakers, as well as in the permanent DJ booth.
Åke Wennersten comments: “Yamaha has a wide range of products and all are of very high quality with regard to both sound quality and reliability. In addition their customer service is second-to-none, from pre-sales through to aftercare..”
One European country which has seen a particularly wide variety of recent installations, with equipment provided by local office Yamaha Hazen, is Spain,
A staple feature of Barcelona nightlife for over 50 years, the Bikini Club has recently reopened in its new home. There is regular live salsa and latin music on its two floors, followed by popular disco tunes. In order to accommodate the wide variety of artists who perform, and give clubbers ultimate sound quality a Yamaha PM5D console and six AD8HR eight-channel mic preamp and A/D converters have been installed, running a Nexo Geo D PA system.
A very different installation is that of a 96 Channel PM1D console in a third Outside Broadcast (OB) van for state-owned national broadcaster Televisión Española (TVE). Following the success of the previous two OB vans, both equipped with PM1Ds, the third vehicle features 96 AES inputs, 48 analogue inputs and supports 20 high definition cameras, including a custom interface for "Audio follow video", which allows the audio signal associated with any video signal to be mixed with that video signal.
Other recent major European installations include the Arena auf Schalke stadium in Gelsenkirchen, the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Schauspiel, Düsseldorf in Germany, Theater Winterthur and the Paul Klee Museum in Switzerland and Opera Wroclaw in Poland.
"With the foundation of the Commercial Audio strategic business unit, Yamaha has created a focussed service & sales approach to the professional audio industry in Central European markets,” says Nils-Peter Keller, manager of Commercial Audio at Yamaha Music Central Europe GmbH, Rellingen, Germany.
“Along with the great products we've seen in the last three years, the European Yamaha CA organisation has developed a sophisticated knowledge base of today’s cutting edge technologies in digital audio networking that we're happy to share with our partners.
He continues: “As a part of Yamaha's success, the massive programme of Yamaha Commercial Audio Training Seminars - which reached around 1.500 sound engineers and consultants in the central European countries alone - has significantly helped to position Yamaha Commercial Audio at the forefront of this exciting and highly competitive sector.”
