The latest construction in the city of Coevorden - situated in the north-east of Holland, and next to CenterParcs - took less than nine months to complete, a considerable achievement since the construction spans more than 10.000sq.m.
The attractions vary from roller coaster rides, turning frogs, carousel, boxcars to a disco featuring the popular girl band K3. Each day the park hosts a different live theatre show and each year they welcome some 400,000 visitors.
Ampco Belgium were again invited to mastermind the sound system concept at the development stage due to their work at other Plopsa theme parks. "Ampco fully understands the needs and philosophy of Studio 100, who want a state of the art install but at the same time are keen on keeping all facilities lean and mean," stated Ampco Belgium MD, Karel de Piere.
A single integrated system needed to fulfill four basic requirements: background music, attraction sound reinforcement, speech and voice evacuation procedures. The system needed to comply with the NEN 2575 regulation (Dutch Fire / Evacuation Standard) and be sufficiently versatile for both the creative and communication functions, integrated via an easy-to-use interface.
After consideration, Ampco Belgium chose Martin Audio as their exclusive speaker brand. As a result, some 150 speakers have been deployed over 32 zones, installed as non-intrusively as possible.
To keep the sources in the background, Ampco opted mainly for Martin Audio's AQ5 and C115 architectural loudspeakers, and C4.8T ceiling speakers for background music or speech announcements, while the 12 hangs of OmnLine micro-array was specified as the theatre sound system, with subs added as necessary. "These were all small format solutions but sufficiently powerful both in SPL and frequency response to host a party for 4,000 people or provide crystal clear hi-fi for visitors as they enter the immense, but beautifully decorated cube," said de Piere.
Aside from music distribution, the system needed to achieve high intelligibility to communicate clearly with the crowds. Thus Ampco turned to a Media Matrix NION system for zonal control with programmed delays, levels and EQ settings and individually treated control of a variety of input channels, ranging from recorded speech, MP3, CD or live announcements. Thus each speaker type and zone has been individually processed to ensure the visitor receives a consistent sound palette throughout the entire experience.
High priority has been given to the PAVA / Voice Evacuation system. Karel de Piere: "As we already had the NION in place we could easily extend the architecture to make a full redundant system that can easily be triggered by the building fire alarm system or safety guard, both internally or externally - there is also UPS back-up." All signals are distributed by Crest CKI amplification and Ethernet, while speaker lines are measured for failing connections and automatically reported back to the NION.
Ampco Belgium were responsible for the concept and engineering of the system while the installation was managed by Harwig Installs, working under the project management of Ampco.
In summary, Karel de Piere said, "With Plopsa Indoor Coevorden we can genuinely talk about a fully-integrated audio-visual system. At the opening everyone agreed that this was again a new step forward."
(Jim Evans)
