The building was then acquired for use by a local bank with a grand opening in 1898 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef I, and has remained in the hands of the financial institutions ever since with numerous renovations and a number of sound systems for the ballroom space having come and gone over the years.
To mark the 150th anniversary of the bank, the owners (Sparkasse Wiener Neustadt) sought to address the problematic acoustics once more as part of a new phase of renovation and that's where Austrian A/V distributor MOCOM became involved with the project, with a demonstration of Tannoy's QFlex. Initially the client was sceptical about the viability of covering the whole space with just four loudspeakers, but after the demonstration they were convinced that this was the way to go and instructed the installation to proceed.
A pair of QFlex 32 was installed towards the front of the space, one of each side of the small stage area, while a pair of QFlex 24 were installed in similar fashion at the other end of the space providing fully controllable audio coverage of that part of the room.
In addition to the four QFlex arrays, a pair of Tannoy IW4 TDC in-wall loudspeakers was installed into the stage front providing near-field coverage to the fore of stage area, as well as a pair of TS 801 subwoofers for additional low end reinforcement on specific occasions only when required. Signal routing is handled by a single Biamp Nexia and RED-1 controller along with a selection of wired and wireless microphones with option to route audio in from an external mixer for larger events.
Rudolf Kamleitner, project lead for MOCOM comments, "Having seen many sound systems come and go over the years in this beautiful room I knew it was quite a risk to stand up claiming to have a solution where all of the others had previously failed. However I was confident to go with Tannoy QFlex and so we arranged a demo. It was kind of a magic moment when seeing the bankers' faces turning into big smiles after switching on the system. From a sales perspective it was really easy from that moment on."
(Jim Evans)
*Pic Jahrfeier
