The Humboldt Forum deploys an IP audio infrastructure with Lawo

The Lawo installation at the famous Berlin Palace on the Spree Island uses three state-of-the-art Lawo mc²56 production consoles and eleven Dallis I/O systems.

He Humboldt Forum, with its museums, event venues, exhibition spaces and facilities for cultural education, is located in the famous Berlin Palace on the Spree Island in the historic center of Berlin.

Although its facades are largely copied from the originals, the interior of the complex is equipped with state-of-the-art technology adapted to modern needs, and supplied by Theirs.

The systems integrator Digitech has installed an iNext-generation IP-based audio infrastructure and connected to the network through a matrix Lawo Nova73 HD located in the center. Designed to be flexible and scalable, Lawo's installation uses three Lawo mc²56 production consoles latest generation and eleven Dallis I/O systems.

All areas for events and sound art projects are connected through Lawo stageboxes, each equipped to meet the requirements of their respective facilities. Signal transfer throughout the building is carried out through the central matrix.

The main rooms of the Humboldt Forum are extensively equipped with audio technology. They include two live event rooms of 500 m² and 461 m², the main lobby and several seminar rooms. The patio Schlüterhof, the passage and other areas are used for outdoor events and activities and are rented by interest groups such as the Stiftung Stadtmuseum (City Museum Foundation), the Humboldt Forum Foundation, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin State Museums) and the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Each of the two rooms houses a control room with a mc²56 (MKIII) mixing console (a 32- and 48-fader console, respectively), as well as a common central equipment room whose connection panel connects to the stage boxes generously distributed throughout the facilities for events and visitors; These are and equipped with interfaces for audio, video, conferencing and control technology.

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The Klangwerkstatt (Sound Workshop), managed by the National Museums in Berlin, undertakes the important task of maintaining the Lautarchiv, a collection of historical sound recordings. This famous archive, one of the first institutions of its kind in Europe, contains a collection of around 7,500 shellac records, wax cylinders and audio tapes with historical recordings, some of which are more than 120 years old, offering visitors and researchers invaluable phonetic and linguistic insight into the era of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic.

In addition to the technical facilities for the restoration of acoustic sources, the sound workshop has a recording studio centered on a third Lawo mc²56 console equipped with 48 faders, offering up to 600 fully equipped broadcast DSP channels and a routing capacity of up to 5120x5120 mono channels. The control room and audio connectivity allow the entire house to be integrated and used for historical and artistic projects.

Birger Gross, Head of Audio and Video Engineering at the Humboldt Forum, comments that "the wide range of events expected in the future, both in terms of space and artistic-technical character, and the network links between them, tipped the balance in favor of the Lawo system. Lawo's mc²56 production console, established and recognized mainly in the broadcast sector and now also in large and small theaters and opera houses, scores in several fields. In addition to its performance and flexibility, it offers intuitive work on the surface itself - including DSP management and measurement and monitoring functions, as well as remote capability through the mxGUI - and its connection capacity, through the Crestron control for example, allows simpler events to be conducted and controlled practically without specialized personnel."

"The eleven Dallis racks are distributed throughout the building and installed in the respective venues, so that the signal paths to the microphone sources remain pleasantly short. As technical operators, we are pleased that the signals from the various venues are also available to all other consoles via the router, and the security of the broadcast is maintained by the configured rights system. This mutual exchange of signals between all venues, supported by Lawo's own redundancy, greatly increases the possibilities creative,” adds Gross.

Además del sistema de sonido principal de Kling&Freitag, la Sala 2 está equipada con un sistema de Vivace reverb with 62 speakers independent on the walls and ceiling, and Room 1 with twelve additional wall speakers. This variability, namely the large number of additional speakers that can be controlled directly by the Lawo system, will also be used by Instrument, an AI-based composition platform. It accesses the sound archive and “composes” it by evaluating ethnological, geographical and theoretical parameters of music. As this instrument develops, it will also include live recordings of the audience, allowing it to react very spontaneously to include “call and response” sound events throughout the house.