With 600 students from across the country, the Lumit performing arts school moved into a new building in central Finland in 2022, with high-tech facilities dedicated to the learning and practice of the performing arts. Earlier this year, the building completed an upgrade of its sound system with a range of Genelec Smart Active Monitors.

Ville Heikkinen is a music lecturer and coordinator of the music studies department at Lumit, teaching band playing, music technology, music production, staging and lighting. He is responsible for the maintenance of these spaces and also works with the school’s in-house A/V engineer on the upkeep of the three stages in the school. He was also Lumit’s planning lead for the music classes, studio and stages during the development of the new building.

‘We were looking for an audio system that would provide high quality listening and also act as a great band PA,’ Heikkinen says. ‘I knew of Genelec, but only in a studio context. Following discussions with Henri Ulmanen from Genelec about what I hoped to achieve, he offered to provide us with a pair of S360s and a subwoofer for testing in our band class so that we could properly evaluate their performance as a band PA system.’

Heikkinen and his students were able to test the system for a month with numerous bands and musical styles. ‘Frankly, it worked out great across all genres,’ he reports. ‘Initially I was a bit nervous about the short-term max SPL of 118dB for the band – but in reality, even pushing it as hard as we could during our rehearsals, we couldn’t make it peak out – and we tried pretty hard.’

The S360 is a versatile two-way loudspeaker that has found its way into studios worldwide thanks to its combination of high-SPL performance and compact size – and with a subwoofer, as was the case for Lumit, it satisfies the demands of electronic dance music (EDM) playback. For this reason, the S360 has been embraced by clubs and live music venues, including the renowned Finnish G LiveLab in Tampere.

For Lumit, Heikkinen and his colleagues opted for a pair of S360s plus a 7380 subwoofer in both the band rehearsal class and the largest music classroom. In both instances the S360s are wall-mounted, while the subwoofer is in its own designated position on the floor beneath the wall furniture. In the main band room, they are connected to the rackmount mixer – and to a desktop mixing console in the second rehearsal space.

‘The Genelec systems work fantastically well in the music and band classes,’ Heikkinen says. ‘The sound is perfect for listening to music, and at the same time we have an amazing sounding audio system for the bands. We also save a huge amount of floor space by having a single system that performs both roles, and having it mounted on the wall.’

In the other two music rooms – which are orientated towards listening rather than playing and performance – there is a combination of wall-mounted 8330s and the larger 8340 two-way loudspeakers, complemented by a 7370 subwoofer in each room. In the studio, Heikkinen selected a pair of 8361 three-way coaxial studio loudspeakers – flagships of The Ones range – combined with a 7380 subwoofer for critical listening.

‘My colleague and I pretty much did the installation and all the wiring ourselves,’ Heikkinen says. ‘However, Henri Ulmanen calibrated all of the loudspeakers for us via Genelec’s GLM software. Visitors to the school are always impressed with our audio systems. We’ve virtually eliminated any feedback issues with the microphones, and all the keyboards sound amazing – we rarely require any EQ. Additionally, even though I was warned that the S360s don’t have a particularly wide dispersion, I’m amazed at how good and detailed the sound is everywhere in the class.

‘Speaking of detail, we get so much more information out of the music compared to listening through regular band PAs. We can hear all the tiny details and nuances that we never heard before – it’s as though a veil has been lifted from our ears. It’s made a real difference to both the teaching and learning experience.’

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