Cultural Center 't Spectrum Schijndel

Project Brief

The project
This cultural centre (opened in 2007) is the local centre for the arts which includes a music school and public library. For further development into a meeting place, the library moved to a building located in the town centre, thereby offering the city council an ideal space for conversion into the long-desired local theatre and events venue. The hall is a shoebox of 32 m length and 16 m width. As a theatre it has a performance area of 10 x 10 m with the required technical stage equipment (trussing, hoists, lighting, sound, curtains etc.) and a flat floor on which retractable seating with excellent sightlines for the audience is installed. The capacity is 245 seated people or about 600 standees. As usual in smaller towns the hall is used for a wide range of activities, which include theatre performances, concerts of different size and repertoire. Film is also a regular programmed type of event. The local art film association does this at least once a month. Therefore, the acoustics of the hall have to be adjustable to the needs of each specific type of performance. Only with a wide range of variable acoustics the multipurpose use of the hall can be served appropriately.

The natural acoustics of the venue were designed for movie and amplified shows, and therefore by default the Reverberation Time (RT) shows 0.6 second after measurement. However, this is to dry for unamplified drama, and each type of unamplified live music performances. Also an amplified concert (band) would benefit from a little more ambience.

Our work
Because of the need to make the space a film venue as well as theatre and as well as a musical performance space, we were invited to think about a hybrid solution. For this reason we built a switch unit so that the client can switch between movie and theatre (acoustics). Both processors (SIAP Mark V and Dolby CP750) use the same amplifiers and loudspeakers, which is a very economic (budget-friendly) solution.

The result
A versatile beautiful small (movie) theatre that is acoustically adjustable to all types of performances by simple selection of the appropriate acoustic. One can choose between the simple settings “movie” and “theatre” which makes life easy for anyone assisting the performance on that moment.  By using the same amplifiers and loudspeaker for each type of performance, this is a very lean, practical and economic solution. The RT can be selected between 0,6 and 5.0 seconds in a number of steps (15) based on the just noticeable difference of about 10% between presets. This range includes presets for drama, piano, small, medium or large orchestra, vocal group and choir, so from an intimate (film)theatre to a recital or concert hall and even a realistic very reverberant cathedral acoustic

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