074 VENUE
“The idea of this hall being fitted with Constellation came from the late Tõnu Susi of Eventech, our local integrator and distributor here in Estonia,” said John. “And when the hall was being designed, he approached the owners, and said: ‘You really want two things with this hall; you want everyone to be near the stage, but you want nearly 2,000 seats’. You can only do that - it’s the laws of volume and physics - if you have very deep balconies. And deep balconies are notoriously bad acoustically. Even if you’ve got a nice auditorium, the sound under the balcony is unlikely to be very nice. “There was also a desire on the part of the developers to be able to stage a rock concert one minute, musical theatre or a chamber orchestra or classical concert the next. They didn’t want to have physically variable acoustics, because they felt that it wouldn’t create the necessary range of reverberation times. With just six cubic metres per occupant, which is what this hall has, the building lacked the volume necessary to achieve long reverberation times for romantic, classical music and choral works. So they had a problem, and there were all sorts of issues that they needed to address; that was when they approached us. “I came to see this place in 2007 when it was just a concrete shell - there was no roof and the outer walls weren’t started. Even then, I got excited about the possibility of actually being able to install Constellation into a venue that had been designed from the ground up, with it in mind.” At Nokia Concert Hall, the Constellation team worked with acoustician, Linda Madalik, who is well established in the Baltic countries. Linda was tasked with creating an acoustic environment that would give the system the best performance conditions, and it was a challenge that John believes she had been waiting for. “She had longed to do a hall fitted with electro-acoustic technology, and this was her great opportunity. She worked extremely hard to create a hall that would meet our needs. For rock music, you really need a low reverberation time. Linda worked hard to give this hall a base reverberation time of one second, and she pretty much nailed it. It’s got a slight rise in the lower frequencies, but that’s not to be unexpected in a good hall. It works brilliantly for rock, with the Constellation system switched off,” explained John. “She designed all the diffusion and absorption that you can see around the hall, both overhead and around the walls, to give a low reverberation time. I should add here that it’s quite tricky building a big hall with a low reverberation time because flutter echoes and
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standing waves that reverberation will disguise can be more easily heard in a dry hall. So she had quite a challenge on her hands, but she did a brilliant job.” For amplified events, the hall is ready with a Meyer Sound reinforcement system that works with the hall’s acoustics. Anchored by a total of 30 MICA and M’elodie line array loudspeakers in a L-C-R configuration, the system also includes M1D front fills, M1D under-balcony fills, UPA-1P loudspeakers, 700-HP subwoofers, and a Galileo loudspeaker management system. The Constellation system comprises a total of 274 discreetly installed speakers, 72 precision-calibrated omnidirectional and cardioid microphones and VRAS processors. Though it is frequently used in conjunction with the main PA for applications such as musical theatre, amplified jazz and folk music, it is a separate system altogether. Speakers used for the system include Stella-4C, Stella-8C, UP-4XP, UPM-1P, and UPJunior VariO loudspeakers, and UMS-1P subwoofers. A touch-screen controller serves as the control interface for selecting the appropriate setting from the presets, offering a range of reverberation times up to 2.5 seconds. “This Constellation system is quite complex in that we wanted to give people under the balconies a good acoustic too. The way we designed the system was to put a comparatively high density of loudspeakers over the upper balcony, underneath the upper balcony and underneath the lower balcony. It’s very important that the audience doesn’t hear sound coming from a loudspeaker, even when standing. The whole idea of this system is that it’s completely transparent.” This density, however, must be managed to uphold the integrity of the system. John continued: “Another key point of Constellation is that all the loudspeakers need to de-correlated from one another. So we don’t have the same signal on adjacent loudspeakers, otherwise you wouldn’t feel you were in a naturally reverberant space. “The underside of the upper balcony has 84 loudspeakers, the underside of the lower balcony has 56. We have one VRAS multichannel reverberator dedicated each balcony system. When people walk around underneath them, when they applaud and when they talk to each other during intermissions, they need to feel as if they’re in a similar acoustic environment to the main auditorium. To help achieve this there are 12 boundary layer microphones under each of the balconies. They’re designed to capture the ambient
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