Kangasala House

SPRING DAY ON THE CANVAS

Kangasala House offers classical and light music, theatre and dance, literature and visual arts - not forgetting events for children and young people. In addition to the concert hall and art museum, the house also houses new meeting rooms for the municipal council and board, equipped with modern meeting technology, including sound and video transmission.

In the council chamber, a Televic central unit for voting and speech systems controls a set of more than fifty Confidea meeting microphones with recording systems. The video side is provided by Panasonic video cameras and robotic surveillance cameras.

Audico's AV contract also included the equipping of the municipal council meeting room and a whole-house digital signage information system with screens.

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A PLATFORM FOR CULTURE

Heikki Mäenpää, who is responsible for the implementation of the house's performance and event technology, is pleased with the prospects for the future of the house, which complements Kangasala's cultural quarter. The completion of the Kangasala House will create significant growth opportunities for the local cultural industry and will even enable international performances to be brought to the area.

"The house will bring together activities that have been tried in the past in different locations, starting with school ballrooms. Now we have an entity that works, even for more demanding productions!"

The pride of the house is the 300-seat Kangasala Hall, where Audico implemented the performance and AV technology, from lighting to sound and video to control systems. The space can be converted from a concert hall to a meeting room, allowing the performance technology to be cleverly bypassed by an AMX control system. The hall is also intended to be used as a cinema, so it was equipped with an appropriate, robust video projector.

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SURROUND SOUND IN THE HALL

According to Mika Oeschi, project manager at Audico, cooperation with both the customer and Akukon Oy, the company responsible for the design, went smoothly.

"The sound system worked really well, thanks to the high-quality L'Acoustics system and the good acoustics of the room," Oesch says.

Mika Eerola, head of the technical team at the Kangasala building, praises Audico for their exemplary cooperation under pressure before the opening, and sums up his experience of the lighting and sound systems as "extremely positive".

Eerola also finds the hall sound system to be fine and adaptable to changes in acoustics. Kangasala Hall, which was originally designed for classical music, is also suitable for amplified music thanks to its adjustable acoustics. For the sound system, L-Acoustics' ARCS system was chosen.

"The hall's viewing geometry was made extremely cost-effective with ARCS' three-array point source solution, which behaves like a line source in terms of summation," says Audico's Pauli Molnár.

L-Acoustics also provides sub and filk speakers, full-fledged cinema surround and stage monitoring.

The DiGiCon SD9 mixer in the sound control room is linked to the stage mix via D-Rack and D2-Rack units. In addition to extensive wired microphone coverage, a Sennheiser wireless microphone system was supplied to the hall.

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THE LINES FEATURE

The performance lighting in Kangasala Hall is controlled by a GrandMA2 Ultra Light Silent console, which is correctly networked with MA Lighting's digital dimmers, Nodes and DMX boosters. Remote control is possible wirelessly using an iPad Mini.

"The light table does not transmit dmx, which has the advantage that any networked computer with MA software can act as a backup alongside the light table," says Audico's Little Mark Tuominen.

In the projectors, the emphasis was on conventional equipment: there are a couple of dozen profile pots in the ceiling, and around fifty Par projectors. In addition to the ADB halogen version, Fresnel-type projectors were purchased, especially the Power Spot 9 LED version from Showtec, which has a very interesting RGBWA-UV colour scheme.

"There are more than enough lines for both light and sound, and they are nicely spaced across the hall, which offers a huge range of possibilities. That aspect is well thought out here too," says Eerola.

Photos by Studio Jukka-Pekka Juvonen.