Spain - The ancient temple of San Miguel in the Spanish city of Cuenca provides a stunning backdrop for Luz Cuenca, a fully-immersive sensory experience offering an artistic expression of the cultural wealth of the city.
Drawing on the city’s history, which is closely linked to art - and especially abstract art - Luz Cuenca is a multimedia exhibition that combines artistic lighting techniques and a dramatic orchestral music score with 2D and 3D projection mapping.
Digital immersive experience specialist Ibercover Studio was in charge of production and content design, turning to leading AV company Fluge to design and supply a high-quality sound system for the project.
Jesús Catá, AV project engineer at Fluge, explains: “Ibercover Studio asked us to design an immersive, robust and high-quality audio system as a key element of the overall immersive experience combining sound, light and projection mapping. The main objective was to effectively and uniformly reproduce sound in space at low volumes. The required SPL levels were not particularly high since the acoustics of the church play an important role in the sound environment, giving more importance to quality rather than pressure. We selected KV2 systems because they are outstanding when it comes to delivering high-quality, detailed, transparent sound at low SPLs, and that’s not easy to do.”
Designed by sound engineer Poti Martín, the system comprises 12 EX26 two-way active loudspeaker systems evenly distributed along the walls of the nave. With its 100 x 100° horn, the EX26 provides wide, even coverage, impressive vocal intelligibility and high-quality musical reproduction.
A further two EX26s reinforce the upper gallery level, while low-end reinforcement is provided by eight EX1.5 subwoofers distributed in pairs either side of the altar, plus a further pair left and right slightly further down the nave.
Due to the immersive character of the room, each loudspeaker receives independent audio signals which are sent via Dante, track by track, from the Watchout 6 video playback system and then processed and distributed to the loudspeakers via NST Audio DSP matrices. Finally, custom white housings were designed for all the loudspeakers to minimise any interference with the video mapping.
“The synergy between the EX26 and the compact EX1.5 subwoofer for the reproduction of the entire sound spectrum in a completely flat manner, with no drop-off at any frequency, is unique,” remarks Catá. “You can hear absolutely every detail of the music exactly as it’s meant to sound, even at low SPLs. However, this doesn’t mean that it won’t reproduce higher SPLs with the same degree of success – indeed, in addition to Luz Cuenca, the system will be used for many other events with more demanding level requirements, and we know it will sound just as good.”
