The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, which is located in Manhattan, New York, has been installed with a Renkus-Heinz audio solution in the facility’s Space Shuttle Pavilion.
Founded in 1982 as a final home for the historic aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, the museum’s treasures now include the world’s fastest commercial jetliner, the British Airways Concorde; the first space shuttle, Enterprise; and the USS Growler, the only American diesel-powered strategic missile submarine open to the public.
More than a million visitors every year tour the museum, which is also home to 27 other authentically restored military aircraft and an 18,000sqft education centre.
Difficult acoustics led the museum to hire the expertise of New York-based Metro Sound Pros.
“The Space Shuttle Pavilion is a large steel facility, which can be acoustically challenging,” commented Leo Garrisonof Metro Sound Pro. “They’ve got fabric covering the inside walls, which helps a little bit with reflections, but it’s still a very large and reverberant space.
The Pavilion’s interior, measuring approximately 100ft by 70ft, is covered by ten Renkus-Heinz CFX81 two-way 8in systems, with five speakers hung, facing each other, on each of the long walls.
“We flew them upside down and about 12 feet up,” added Garrison. “We divided the space into essentially five zones, each with left and right speakers. When they have a live event, that enables them to shut off any zone where a microphone will be positioned.”
A pair of Biamp MCA 8150 amplifiers power the system, bridged to provide approximately 300W per pair. A Symetrix Jupiter provides signal delays and processing. The system has also been set up with different pre-sets for spoken word presentations and other programme material
“The CFX81s were really the ideal solution for their needs and for their budget,” Garrison concluded. “The pattern control is excellent, and because the coverage they deliver is so wide – 150 degrees by 60 degrees – we were able to cover an exceptionally large area with very few of them.”
