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Marquee Audio Enhances the Yehudi Menuhin Legacy
Marquee Audio has completed the installation of a user-friendly audio-visual system for the students and staff of the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, in their brand-new performance venue, the Menuhin Concert Hall.
The 315-seat Concert Hall, a chamber music venue, and a daily performance, tuition and rehearsal space for the school's use, is also available for hire for other music events and recording sessions.
Its construction was inspired by the death of the school's mentor Yehudi Menuhin in 1999, and was finally opened in January of this year. Lead architect Mark Foley of Burrell Foley Fischer worked closely with the School's acoustician Bob Essert of Sound Space Design and theatre consultants Anne Minors Performance Consultants.
Marquee Audio was invited to join Sound Space Design, audio consultant Simon Kahn and the school team in drawing up an optimum AV specification for the new Hall. "The driving force behind the project was the school's wish to be able to record whatever takes place in the Hall," explains Marquee's Andy Huffer. "It has been designed as a realistic concert hall environment for performance and practice, as well as a commercially independent venue; our task was to provide a good audio infrastructure for all those uses, and also to give them a recording facility."
Because that recording facility could be required by any student or teacher, the interface was kept utterly simple; just one RECORD button to be pressed on a keypad behind the rear wall of the stage area. The recording process takes place at the other end of the auditorium, in a small control room, where Andy Huffer has specified a customised audio PC using beyerdynamic's STENO-S software to capture CD-quality stereo recordings from a pair of microphones permanently installed in the hall.
"This is the first time we've used the STENO-S software," explains Huffer, "it was the only way of achieving what the client wanted, namely a reliable remote one-button start to recording, but this software also facilitates the export of files and burning of CDs." A pair of Tannoy Reveal active monitors and a Yamaha 01V96 mixer completes the set-up in the control room.
In the auditorium, Marquee has provided a high-quality projector with electric drop-down screen above the stage, ready for DVD and VHS playback. Using Marquee's custom-designed bracketry, a pair of KV2 Audio EX12 speakers has been discreetly installed behind the acoustic baffles which hold the screen, providing an auditorium sound reinforcement system when required.
Although the Menuhin Hall has its own in-house AV technician Brian Fifield, Marquee has kept the control interface for all devices as simple as possible. At the back of the stage, a basic 16-button keypad provides transport control for all the devices in the control room, the all-important RECORD button, and the main control for the projector and screen.
Facilities panels have been installed all around the building, the majority of which carry multi-channel audio and CAT5 data lines. In total, there are 25 panels of varying size, dotted around front-of-house and backstage areas, in the dressing rooms, control room and auditorium. A dual control room position allows a choice between mixing from the sound booth or from the audience environment.
The system is tied together via a CUE control system, which interfaces to a BIAMP Nexia to handle all the DSP processing, carrying multiple audio inputs and feeds to the main speaker system. A default ‘auto mode’ ensures that all the Trantec radio microphones and playback devices are preset at a level optimised for the speakers. The system also interfaces to the beyerdynamic STENO-S software on the control room PC, and the source equipment. Marquee has also installed an Ampetronic induction loop system and Sennheiser infra-red system for hearing assistance.
According to Andy Huffer, Marquee Audio projects "tend to use equipment we're familiar with, and know that we can rely on. Our clients can be confident that each system we design will be optimised to their needs, but always be future-proofed from a technological standpoint and above all reliable.
"In the case of the Menuhin Hall, I'm proud of how we've worked with the client to produce an optimum solution in both audio and video terms. We've successfully taken modern AV concepts and integrated them according to the School's brief and budget."
It is anticipated that there will be significant demand for the use of the Hall from outside the School, from local organisations, recording companies and other societies. With the private rentals diary already filling up, the success of the Menuhin Hall in this respect is most pleasing to headmaster Nicolas Chisholm.
"The Hall puts this school on the map; it's a dedicated concert space,which is acoustically suitable for one-to-one teaching and masterclasses, large enough to prepare our students for a big acoustic, but also intimate and supportive. Marquee Audio has done a first-class job in giving us a foolproof system for recording and archiving what goes on in the Hall; recordings which will be used for teaching reference, for auditions and for competitions. In due course, we plan to record CDs of performances to sell on behalf of the school."
Founded by the violinist and conductor, Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) in 1963, the school, which is based in Cobham, Surrey, is funded by the Department for Education as a Centre of Excellence for the Performing Arts. Its student body is musically gifted children, aged between 8 and 18, who demonstrate exceptional potential, primarily on stringed instruments and piano.
11th May 2006
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