The Adelaide Convention Centre is set to open mid-2017, and its choice of PA for the new 3,500-seat Plenary Hall has been Meyer Sound’s Leopard compact line array system.
Marshall Day Entertech, who has previously partnered successfully with Woods Bagot on the recent redevelopment of the Melbourne Convention Centre, was directly engaged by the architect to develop the full technical design brief for the new building.
Central to the design of the plenary hall is its adaptability, which the Leopard system supports seemlessly. The venue not only uses hinged seating sections to transform the raked theatre into a flat floor exhibition hall, but a giant dividing operable wall system can divide the space into two rooms, each containing 1,750 seats. In addition, a design innovation not previously built in Australia, are two rotating ‘drum theatres’ that sit concealed within the larger raked seating arrangement. These seating sections can be rotated away from the stage to create two 250 seat smaller theatrettes, each serviced by individual lighting and audio systems.
“We’ve designed the system so the ACC don’t have to constantly fly the system in and out,” said Meyer Sound Australia’s Chris D’Bais. “We will run individual signal and power feeds to every box, and through our Galileo Galaxy processing, the ACC will be able remotely load whichever preset suits the room configuration — if they’re only using the front half of the room, for example, they can turn the top of the array off so there’s no extra SPL bouncing around the empty space. Each independent space will have its own independent processor, so separate users can control their sub-systems. Then in full mode, the main processor collates all the data and controls the combined system.”
