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Cobranet Pays Dividends for Brew House
BSS Audio is at the centre of an ambitious new media and music production complex in the centre of Gothenburg.
The 70-year-old four-storey building, which at various times functioned as the Apotekarnes brewery and Ethnographic Museum, began its conversion to a creative centre specialising in film and music production back in 2002 — the result of an initiative floated by the Business Region Göteborg.
Designed to encourage collaboration and networking, the facility also incorporates a restaurant, conference room, and the large 600 sq. metre Stena Arena; in fact it was the donation of 10 million Swedish kronor from Stena A Olssons Foundation for Research and Culture that had enabled the consortium to commit to a cutting edge sound and lighting infrastructure in the Arena.
With acoustic buffering and floating floors, the complex has been developed at a cost of 50 million Swedish kronor (£4 million) and operated by HIGAB (Hantverks-och Industrihus I Göteborg AB). It is a remarkable undertaking which already boasts full occupancy, the 60 resident companies from the fields of music, movies, media, entertainment and education all able to interact.
However, it was only a chance meeting between Lennart Dahlgren, from BSS Audio’s distributor Septon Electronics, and Martin Saleteg, from the Brew House’s technical reference group, that elevated the original part-analogue spec to a full digital system solution.
Said Dahlgren: “We favour the complete system approach. With BSS Audio’s Soundweb London it’s easy to expand the number of inputs and outputs, and use a Crown amplifier with a CobraNet card as a break in/break out point. Not many suppliers can offer that level of sound control and system supervision over a network.”
He continued: “Because Martin was an IT guy he was immediately interested in the possibilities, and attended the LLB Show in Stockholm where we went through all the components. We proposed a CobraNet solution using Soundweb BLU-80’s and BLU-32’s and Crown CTs amplifiers fitted with CobraNet cards — and as a result they rewrote the spec.”
Martin Saleteg had immediately seen the advantages of being able to co-ordinate CobraNet’s Layer 2 switching within a wider environment. He sensed that in order for Brew House to function to the optimum, both transmitting conferences and seminars from the Arena as well as live music files for studio editing, a sophisticated digital distribution over Ethernet was required. His belief was confirmed by Håkan Alfredsson, director of production specialists, United Audio, who were contracted to carry out the installation.
Saleteg explains: “We already had a Cat6 separately shielded network with Cisco Layer 3 switching throughout the facilities. We run a Gigabit network, sharing a 50Mb fibre uplink to the Internet; using Soundweb London we can send CobraNet in a separate VLAN to and from the studios. Thanks to the massive bandwidth provided by our Cisco backbone, we can also run IP telephony and other streaming services on the same network. “
The aim is to run 32 channels of CobraNet from the stage to any of the studios for live recording mixdowns. The main FOH sound mixer has already been equipped with two CobraNet cards and the signal will be distributed via the Soundweb London BLU-32 I/O expansion devices.
All the processing and routing is handled by a BLU-80 and BLU-32 configured with just four outputs and the remainder inputs. “Using Soundweb London gives us the advantage of a CobraNet option,” agrees Håkan Alfredsson. “We use this option so we don’t need so many outputs to drive the amplifiers.” Eight Crown CTs 3000 amplifiers are fitted with USP3-CN cards which in turn power three L/C/R clusters of four JBL VRX enclosures and two pairs of ground-stacked SRX subs — along with six JBL 8340 cinema surrounds.
United Audio has made provision for two mix positions in the room and a large patchbay has been provided based on their standard 12-channel multi-connector principle, using a BSS Audio MSR-604 II 4-channel active splitter solution for up to 48 channels.
The auditorium is also fully equipped with production lighting (supplied by Primetec) and Brew House has purchased a 4K Sony cinema prpojector as part of its vision set up. Once fully commissioned the aim will be to encourage the development of experimental music; the Arena will also host engineering and music production courses and the facility will be used by the Gothenburg Music School.
United Audio Starlight AB have developed a reputation for carrying out installations on this scale having been involved in the last three upgrades of the Gothenburg Opera House and also carried out the massive sound system installation at Liseberg, Scandinavia’s largest funfair. On the rental side, having merged his original company Göteborg Audio with other companies to form United Audio/Starlight Håkan Alfredsson says they now have the equipment and transportation necessary to service tours throughout the whole of Scanadinavia.
27th October 2006
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