52 l July 2012 installationreport
them have experience of Lawo in OB vans; but it’s also because the consoles are designed to be easy to use. “When I first saw this console, my first impression was: many buttons, easy to use!” says Michel. “A near-analogue feel makes the desk fast to use – you don’t have to step through many menus. Here you just touch what you like, and it gets on the screen instantly.” The venue hosts “every kind of
Each of the main hall’s four control rooms has a Lawo mc2
66 audio console GERMANY
Meeting convention requirements
A wide variety of events take place in the halls adjoining ICS Stuttgart’s exhibition grounds. Paddy Baker went to look at the equipment used to deliver these events – including the audio distribution backbone
BUILT ONthe site of cabbage fields, Stuttgart’s current trade fair building opened in October 2007. It has enviable transport links – it is right next to Stuttgart airport, it’s on the local railway network and its car park straddles the A8 autobahn. Over 1.1 million visitors to 53 events passed through its doors last year, helping to generate an income of €99 million. Aside from the nine
exhibition halls, the International Congresscenter Stuttgart (ICS) consists of three main parts: the great hall (known as C1), which occupies an area of 2,669sqm and is used for special events and conferences; a 5,000sqm hall that generally houses exhibitions, although it can be used for conferences; and a set of smaller meeting rooms, the largest of which can accommodate up to 440 people. Audio and video installation at the ICS was carried out by
Thomann Audio Professionell of Burgebrach in Bavaria. Around 165km of signal, control and power cabling was required, with over 400 junction boxes and floor ducts connected to 31 patch panels.
C1 can be split into as many
as four parts, using mobile dividing walls. Accordingly, in addition to the main control room, there are three further control rooms. These can be allocated to a different part of the room when it is split, or can all be used to control events in the great hall. Audio and control signals are
sent around the building via a fibre optic network – there are a total of 1,824 inputs and 1,712 outputs. Each of C1’s four control rooms has its own Lawo mc266 console. The two largest have 40 faders (arranged in modules of 16, 8 and 16), while the other two have 32 (16- 8-8) and 24 (8-8-8). Each is connected to its own Lawo Core,
which looks after routing, DSP and power requirements. Further routing, plus input/ output rights management, is handled by a higher-level Lawo Nova73 HD router. “There weren’t too many systems that you could use for this task,” explains Jörn Michel, technical supervisor at Landesmesse Stuttgart. “We are connecting to the same stageboxes, to the same input boxes, the same connectors even, from different desks, without using analogue methods like using splitters. We have a direct digital connection, even on different consoles.” This set-up also provides useful redundancy for large events: “If something breaks down, we can change seamlessly to the next control room and use the other desk – in seconds.” The mc266 consoles are popular with engineers who come in for events at the Messe. In part this is because many of
event you can imagine”, according to Michel, from congresses and company events to cover rock and classical music concerts. Most of the audio comes from microphones – and the highest channel requirement comes when a full orchestra is playing. The main hall features d&b audiotechnik speakers and amplifiers: flown clusters of C4-TOP mid/high speakers and C4-SUBs, with MAX monitors for downfill, powered by D12 amplifiers. These clusters can be moved around two or three metres forwards or backwards, depending on whether or not the state elements in the floor below are being used. “If we have to connect to
different locations, we have the DALLIS – I/O connection boxes – and we have three racks of stageboxes, which we can place in the exhibition halls and elsewhere as needed,” continues Michel. An example of this approach happened two years ago, when a jazz festival was held in the 25,000sqm Hall 1, the largest of the exhibition halls. “We made connections all over the area to take sound from that hall and play it out in other halls, VIP areas, over the whole exhibition centre.” There is a Bosch voice alarm system, which runs over a separate network from the main
audio system, for reasons of security. However, there is a connection between the two networks. For company annual general meetings, audio from the hall needs to be relayed over common areas such as corridors and toilets, so that delegates hear as much of what is said as possible. This is done by routing the audio through the voice alarm speakers. “We built an additional connection to the evacuation system to use with special events, so that all the speakers can be used,” he explains. Is there anything that the
Lawo system can’t do? “It can’t make coffee!” laughs Michel. “No, I don’t think there’s anything that a mixing desk should do which the system can’t do. You have all possibilities of inputs and outputs in digital and analogue ways; we have more inputs than we could ever use. Most pieces are redundant, so if one controller card gets an error you can swap it, or you just get an attention marker on the display and everything keeps on working.”
Although the Messe opened
nearly five years ago, the installation doesn’t feel that old. Part of the reason is that the Lawo mc266 desks are regularly updated with the latest software. To those in the know, the only thing that betrays their age is their legs – they are the earlier Mark I design, not the current Mark II. Fortunately, that’s one element that has no effect whatsoever on the quality of the delivered sound. n
www.audioprof.thomann.de www.dbaudio.com www.lawo.de www.messe-stuttgart.de www.riedel.net
www.prosoundnewseurope.com
Over 1.1 million visitors attended the 53 events that took place at Stuttgart Messe last year
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60