A new audio installation
designed to transform the
PA/VA intelligibility on the concourse
of
Stockholm’s historic, 19th
century
Central Railway Station is the
latest phase in a multi-million-Kroner
upgrade of the country’s national rail
network passenger information systems.
On October 1st, national rail operator
Banverket unveiled its solution to
the station’s cavernous acoustics, in the
shape of the world’s largest Renkus-
Heinz Iconyx digitally steerable array
system, distributed over
CobraNet by a
Peavey MediaMatrix Nion system.
The journey from Stockholm’s
gleaming, modern
Arlanda Airport direct to the city centre aboard the hightech
‘Arlanda Express’ bullet train is a
20-minute trip through the country’s
mechanised transport history. Central
Station, the hub of the country’s rail
network and the city’s metro system, is
an officially protected building with an
iconic status in Sweden similar to that
of Grand Central Station in New York.
It’s great for those who have time to
dwell over a latte and savour the marble
concourse’s elegant arched roof, but
bad news for the soaring numbers of
rail travellers hoping to hear clear departure
details for their train. Banverket
has had to contend both with equally
old-time acoustics and rapidly growing
passenger numbers – adding daily to
the ambient noise. As elsewhere across
Europe, demand at the station is fast
outstripping capacity, but relief will not
arrive until 2017 when the new City
Line, currently under construction, doubles
train capacity through the centre.
The public address system at the station,
which handles 500 trains and
80,000 passengers a day, has been delivered
for many years by a distributed system
of large horns, some mounted in
pairs under the roof’s apex, others along
the concourse’s platform-side wall.
Intelligibility, aside from a sweet spot
in a central area of the concourse, was
increasingly regarded as “unacceptable”,
according to
Mats Liikamaa, project manager
for Banverket, whose technical division
is responsible for the network’s public
information systems.
“Rail passenger
traffic in Sweden is growing so fast now,
especially as people are becoming so
much more environmentally conscious,”
he says,
“and people need information
all the time, everywhere. It’s not acceptable
for announcements not to be clearly
understandable at every point in the
station, especially where safety and security
are concerned.”
For Banverket this new system is the
most high profile element of a project
that will see the national network’s existing
analogue telecoms-based audio
information system, which already
allows stations to be addressed from
Stockholm, replaced by a digital system
that includes the VA component. The
Nion system is configured as the interface
between Stockholm’s new ‘house’
PA and the forthcoming nationwide
digital network.
Banverket had an experienced
designer to call on for a solution when
the decision to make a radical change
was made last year.
Ljud & Säkerhet
(Sound & Security), based in
Gothenburg and headed by
Sten
Ranwald, specialises in audio installations
for railway stations and churches
and Ranwald himself had earlier
worked on IT networks for Banverket.
He found himself pushing at an open
door when he proposed that an improvement
to Gothenburg railway station’s PA
intelligibility was not only necessary, but
achievable.
“I had to collect my son from
the station and couldn’t understand the
announcements because of the reverberant
field,” he says.
“I said to the railway
company, ‘What are you doing about
this; I couldn’t hear a thing?’ They
laughed at me and said there had been
five [designers] here before and they didn’t
succeed; how are you planning to succeed?
I told them I had the tools, the
knowledge and the curiosity, and they
gave me a chance. And I guess they were
pretty satisfied.”
The results in Gothenburg – based
on custom built line array loudspeakers
– were sufficiently convincing for Banverket to contract Ljud & Säkerhet
to provide systems for a further 24 stations,
beginning with the country’s second
city, Malmö. Stockholm took
somewhat longer to become number
25. Its historic status and sheer size
required a new solution to meet stringent
architectural as well as acoustic
demands, involving extensive site
research to ensure both criteria would
be met, finally gaining approval earlier
in 2007 from the Ministry for the
Protection of Historic Buildings.
With aesthetics ranked a strong second
behind intelligibility, the
Iconyx system
was specified to fulfil both aspects
of the brief. A row of 11
IC16 array cabinets,
each just under 189cm tall and
around 15 x 18cm in profile, is mounted
two metres from ground level along the
entire length of the concourse wall that
faces the street entrances. Midway along
this wall and a metre higher is the eightmetre
wide electronic destination board,
angled slightly down for clarity. One
IC16 is bolted flush at either end, painted in
matching black. All the other
IC16s are
mounted flush to the wall using one pair
of the built-in hinges, which allow each
cabinet to be swung away from the wall
for access to the integral electronics.
Further cabinets are located in the ticket
lobby to one end and a pair of entrance
lobbies, in the latter case using the eightdriver
IC8 active arrays.
