The Autostadt is the world's largest automobile distribution centre and its automobile museum - the ZeitHaus - is the world's largest. With a multitude of cultural events staged there each year, the Autostadt is also an attractive venue for cultural pursuits, offering an ambience in which art, architecture and design combine to superlative effect in a 25-hectare landscaped park.
Work began on a technical upgrade to the Autostadt's sound reinforcement system around a year ago. The planning, project management and supervision were undertaken by the bureau of engineers Taube+Goerz under the direction of Dirk Narten, whilst the implementation was entrusted to Profi Musik.
On-site responsibility was in the hands of Matthias Heinz and Jörg Lüdermann, project managers of the Autostadt; Jan Ohlhagen, project manager of Profi Musik; and Stefan Waltermathe, project manager of M-Akustik, the Dynacord distribution partner and system specialist from Oldendorf in Hesse. The result is the world's largest installation combining the Dynacord P64 with Promatrix DPM-4000 digital audio matrices.
In the course of the installation, the team was able to build on an already existing Dynacord system: the Autostadt already possessed 20 Dynacord ELA control centres plying the various brand pavilions and catering areas with background music and announcements. The objective, then, was to unite the individual amplifier banks in a redundant network conforming to the safety standards applicable to centralized and decentralized alarm and evacuation systems.
The central concern, therefore, was to create a combination of ELA system and audio matrix combining very high quality audio performance and a large number of channels with several centralized and decentralized priorities. The chosen system features a Dynacord P64 combined with a PromatrixX DPM-4000 controller.
"At the moment there is no other combination of ELA and matrix systems on the market that allows you to programme individual functions over such a broad spectrum and combine them with one another," explains Mathias Vette, whose company M-Akustik was responsible as the system supplier of Profi Musik for the programming and system integration. "No other system permits control from within an ELA structure with such high audio quality."
(Jim Evans)
