As part of the Royal Horticultural Society’s recent £1 million refurbishment of The Lawrence Hall in Victoria, London, Sound By Design was contracted to install a high quality public address system that would be versatile enough to handle the wide variety of events that the venue caters for.

A particular problem in the past was the sound leakage from the hall into nearby residential properties, resulting in severe noise restrictions being set by the local authority. Before committing to a system design, Sound By Design prepared a detailed report on the acoustics and noise leakage from the venue, in which we made a number of suggestions to improve the situation. The reverberation time in the venue was measured to be around 6 seconds, one of the largest we have ever seen!  As a result of this the Royal Horticultural Society's directors decided to go ahead with the installation of a draping system, double-glazing and window blinds, which improved the acoustics greatly.

Project Manager Griff Hewis decided to install Duran Audio Intellivox loudspeakers, which have a proven track record for speech intelligibility in difficult acoustics. In conjunction with Duran Audio UK’s Nick Screen, a design was arrived at which would provide maximum flexibility for various configurations of the room utilising four Intellivox DS280 and two Intellivox DS500 loudspeakers. RCF Monitor 44s and EM Acoustics I2s were also used as fills for areas outside the coverage of the main system.

On the control side of things a Biamp Audia Flex unit was chosen as the main DSP for the system, allowing a very powerful software design to be implemented. Different operation modes can be recalled by the user from a wall panel in the hall, changing the room from an end-on configuration to a side-on configuration at the flick of a switch. Visiting companies can also patch into the new system via inputs in the hall.