Leiden, the Netherlands (May 5, 2017)—When is a house-of-worship install not a house-of-worship install? When the HOW in question is a deconsecrated 14th century gothic cathedral in Leiden, the Netherlands. Repurposed as a community events center, Pieterskerk Leiden still has all the majesty of a massive cathedral, but it also retained all the inherent acoustical challenges, too.
Situated in the heart of Leiden, about 35 km southwest of Amsterdam, Pieterskerk was built over a period of 180 years beginning in 1390. A Dutch national heritage site, it was deconsecrated in 1974 and is now operated by a non-profit foundation.
Faced with designing an facility audio system that could be reconfigured for various functions and events, Pieterskerk Leiden managing director Frieke Hurkmans and Eric Mattijsen of Audio Electronics Mattijsen (AEM) created an audio system based around 36 self-powered Meyer Sound loudspeakers and integrated AVB audio networking
Mattijsen noted, “They have five different set-up configurations for the space, which means five different sound source locations. The best solution by far was the CAL beam steering loudspeaker, working with an instantly reconfigurable distributed system of small, self-powered loudspeakers.”
The completed installation features a CAL 32 column array loudspeaker with advanced digital beam steering, two UPM-1P and two UPJunior loudspeakers, plus 12 UPJunior-XP and 20 UPM-1XP IntelligentDC loudspeakers. A Galileo GALAXY network platform will be programmed by AEM to handle signal processing and matrixing for the various system configurations.
Meyer Sound
www.meyersound.com
