The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra installed an AV upgrade from Renkus-Heinz for its Mills Room.

The Mills Room is an ornate conferencing space that hosts up to 54 people including some high-profile visitors given the university’s proximity to parliament. Alder Technology was the firm that designed and specified the system for ANU.

“Because the space was deemed to be of heritage importance, we were given the directive of no substantive changes to the room,” Alder Technology consultant Christopher Watson says.

“The space itself is roughly 17 by 12m in size, and it has a massively vaulted ceiling. It’s also made of solid concrete, with a floating wall existing on one side. Simply put, the acoustics in the room were very poor and would present a challenge.”

He adds that the team needed to precisely position audio in the space as well as install as little as possible to architecturally preserve the space. These needs led him to Renkus-Heinz.

“Renkus-Heinz is a great audio solution for any space because of its quality, but when you have a lot of challenges in an install, the products they make really show their strengths,” he says.

“With Renkus-Heinz we’re now looking at a room that looks aesthetically balanced and has sound characteristics that are performance worthy. No need for pendants or ceiling speakers, just perfect sound with two steerable arrays.”

The installation makes use of two Renkus-Heinz IC8 digitally steerable line array loudspeaker systems installed at the front of the room on the ‘floating wall’. Part of the ICONYX line, the IC8s make use of Renkus-Heinz’ industry-leading digitally steerable technology, allowing venues of all sizes and types to digitally position sound exactly where you want it: on the audience. By programming the arrays digitally, the sound stays off the peculiarities of the room and is directed entirely toward the audience’s ears.

With its compact footprint and Audinate’s Dante audio-over-IP protocol, the loudspeakers were installed without impacting the historically important architecture in the space.

“We really like to talk about the audio capabilities of Renkus-Heinz,” says Lucas Catanese, project manager at MNGD – the integrator on the project.

“But we also know there are installations where architects want to maintain a certain look and feel. This location, obviously, had a very important reason to do that. Renkus-Heinz allowed us to still integrate a system everyone loves while balancing the needs of the heritage space.”