Known in Switzerland as Universitäts Spital Zürich, or USZ, the University Hospital of Zürich’s administrators took advantage of classrooms and lecture halls made empty by Covid-19 lockdowns to upgrade the performance of the USZ campus sound systems. Renkus-Heinz distributor promedias advised the installation of steerable loudspeaker solutions from Renkus-Heinz to deliver optimum audio to students and educators alike.
The institution’s academic staff of 4,500 provides instruction to upwards of 24,000 students annually, making USZ one of the largest and best respected teaching hospitals in Europe. However, less-than-intelligible audio in a classroom can be distracting, induce fatigue, reduce attention spans and negatively impact student comprehension. To solve such intelligibility problems, the administrators set out on a mission to deploy advanced sound solutions for all their learning environments.
The school’s lecture halls are relatively shallow and have steep tiered, theatre-style seating for more than 150 students. The irregular shape of the spaces coupled with reflective ceiling and wall surfaces creates a difficult-to-manage acoustic environment.
‘The instructors had difficulty addressing students because the sound levels in the halls were very inconsistent,’ says promedias CEO, Chris Steiger. ‘They needed systems to precisely control high-quality sound to cover the space evenly, therefore increasing intelligibility. Our team knew Renkus-Heinz beam steering arrays would provide the control and coverage needed, all without being a visual distraction within the space
The promedias team wall mounted a pair of Iconyx Compact beam steering arrays behind the podiums in each of the lecture halls. The ICC12/3 array systems feature an individually controlled, 12-channel digital amplifier that powers the array’s 12 full-range, 3-inch drivers. The compact footprint of the ICC12/3 allowed promedias to integrate quality sound into lecture halls with a small, attractive and easy-to-install system.
‘When we started to define the Iconyx Compact arrays, we had this exact type of application in mind; the spaces where the quality of spoken word is critical and audio needs to be tightly controlled, but the product footprint needs to be minimal,’ says Renkus-Heinz European Technical Sales Manager, Michał Popławski. ‘The ICC Series provides integrators great flexibility in terms of price, performance and footprint.’
USZ’s standard classrooms also needed sound system upgrades. While these square, flat rooms with seating for 80 didn’t require the same beam-steering technology as the lecture halls, comparable coverage and intelligibility was still critical. promedias specified a set of Renkus-Heinz, C Series CX62 and CX82 externally-powered loudspeakers and a CA112S self-powered subwoofer for each of the smaller classroom configurations. Thanks to the application-driven engineering of the C Series, USZ now provides students with exceptionally high speech intelligibility that will undoubtedly produce better academic outcomes.
‘Our spaces required excellent intelligibility and promedias was able to deliver that with Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers,’ says USZ AV-Technician, Martin Püntener. ‘From the first rows to the last, the coverage is smooth, the sound is pleasing and understandable. We look forward to upgrading the rest of our spaces, getting back to full attendance, and sharing these excellent new systems with all our instructors and students.’
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