Also known as the East Parry room, the Carne Room in the Royal College of Music’s East Tower in London functions as a multi-use space for performance, practice, teaching and meetings, with visitors treated to views overlooking the Royal Albert Hall. It is one of the institution’s four Parry Rooms, whil are named after composer Hubert Parry who served as Royal College of Music Director between 1895 and 1918. It is also home to a new installation of Audio-Technica Dante-enabled Ceiling Array microphones.
The room requires to deliver high-quality audio during hybrid meetings, with the ATND1061DAN Dante-enabled Beamforming Ceiling Array microphones unobtrusively placed in the room’s vaulted ceiling – which received a custom paintjob by Aura Futures, ensuring the perfect fit for the venue’s aesthetic.
‘While the natural reverb in the room is wonderful for acoustic performances, when we started hosting hybrid or online meetings in here, it wasn’t ideal for speech,’ explains Royal College of Music A/V and Broadcast Engineer, Andy Denyer. ‘It immediately became clear that we needed a solution that would allow meeting participants to clearly be heard by remote attendees, without feedback echoing through the system.
‘Additionally, the multi-purpose nature of Carne Room meant that ease-of-use and deployment was a real priority. We used to spend an hour setting up tabletop microphones with a mixer and audio interface for each meeting – logistically that became untenable.
‘We realised that permanently-installed ceiling microphones were going to be the way forward and having auditioned several, we settled on a pair of Audio-Technica ATN1061DAN models, which give us great coverage over a large area. We weren’t necessarily expecting a super-clear, crisp “meeting room” result – we needed to avoid using any acoustic treatment that might have made that possible – but the results were much better than we predicted. The beamforming functionality of the ATND1061 ensures very precise pickup.
‘The microphones deliver excellent, intelligible speech and the onboard DSP, echo-cancelling and the fact that they’re Dante-enabled they integrate nicely into our wider Dante network - they’ve proved to be the perfect solution for us,’ he reports.
Opened in 1883, the Royal College of Music (RCM) is a world leading music conservatoire with a prestigious history and contemporary outlook. In 2024 the Royal College of Music was ranked the Global No. 1 institution for Performing Arts for the third year running and earned the inaugural top spot for Music in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.
The RCM has trained some of the most important figures in British and international music including composers and performers Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. Regular visitors include Sir Thomas Allen, Sir Antonio Pappano, Alina Ibragimova and Lang Lang.
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