Exhibo, EAW Team Up For Prestigious Galileo Awards
Exhibo S.p.A., EAW's distributor for Italy, provided expert support in the deployment of EAW LS432 line source loudspeakers and JF50 compact loudspeakers to supply highly intelligible sound reinforcement for the Galileo Awards, held recently in Padua, Italy.
The prestigious event, honoring scientific inquiry and literature, was fittingly held at the historic Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, the town that is the site of Galileo's observatory in the early 1600's when he helped complete an astronomical revolution.
Further, Palazzo della Ragione is one of the most important ancient buildings of the European Age of Commons, constructed starting in 1218. The beautiful hall, measuring 82 meters (270 feet) long and 27 meters (85 feet) wide, has a roof shaped as a reversed hull, with hard surfaces abounding. A tough acoustical situation, to say the least, and one that the sound team worked carefully to tame with a distributed sound design featuring the LS432 and JF50 loudspeakers mounted on stands throughout the listening area.
"Due to its extremely high reverberation time, the room has always been a nightmare for rental companies to organize events," explains Riccardo Rasponi, Exhibo rep for the Venice area, who served as the coordinator between the rental companies - Target Due of Padova and Full Sound Service of Pressana - that worked the event.
"The highest speech intelligibility was the goal for these ceremonies," Riccardo continues, "and this dictated loudspeakers with extremely narrow and controlled vertical coverage patterns within the speech frequency spectrum. The LS432 did this job perfectly."
Specifically, LS432 loudspeakers were positioned along the long walls of the hall, supplemented by JF50's. "Switching the impedance from 4 ohms to 16 ohms, which was done by Full Sound, allowed eight JF50's to be driven with one amplifier in a quick and reliable way. As a result, the entire room was fully covered by only eight LS432's and eight JF50's."
Guido Diamanti, Exhibo's electroacoustic designer, adds: "We did some careful calculations in order to determine the exact right number of loudspeakers, to be sure that not only could enough sound pressure level be attained, but also to avoid stray energy that would serve as reverberated sound."
All went very well with the application, Riccardo notes, and in fact, Padua authorities have already asked for the same system for other events scheduled for later this month.
