OMNILINE WINS AVIA AWARD FOR 4TH YEAR
For the fourth year running Martin Audio's OmniLine has garnered a top prize in the AVIA (Audio Visual Industry) Awards - that reward excellence and celebrate innovation in the Australia/Pacific Region. In 2014, OmniLine won in the category of Best Application of AV in a Commercial or Government Installation with a budget between $100,000 and $500,000m, for Acoustic Directions and their design for the installation at St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney.
The acoustic design team of Acoustic Directions, Glenn Leembruggen and David Gilfillan, worked with Wizard Projects and were supported by the engineering team from Technical Audio Group (TAG), to install a large 140-element Martin Audio OmniLine system into St Andrew's Cathedral. The system needed to be commissioned in time for the visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as part of their Australia and New Zealand tour.
St. Andrew's is the oldest cathedral in Australia - and one of the city's finest cathedral examples of Gothic Revival architecture - but such beautiful architecture comes at an acoustic cost with challenging reverberation times making clarity and evenness of coverage across the congregation a constant issue.
Having struggled with a sound system that failed to deliver clear speech intelligibility and live music reproduction, with the Royal appointment imminent, the church's decision to install a new system reached emergency status.
Ross Cobb, Director of Music at St Andrew's, and Canon Chris Allan were given the job of raising tenders for design, installation and commissioning of a state of the art system with absolutely no compromise in sound quality - to be fulfilled in just two weeks.
The AVIA Awards are judged by an independent panel composed of six seasoned industry professionals representing InfoComm, AETM and ALIA. On awarding the prize, the judges said, 'this was a careful application of the most advanced available audio technologies to solve a previously-intractable acoustic situation with an easy-to-operate system - all achieved in a theoretically impossible time frame for a royal visit.'
Canon Christopher Allan added, 'The project has totally exceeded expectations in quality and usability. The speed and smoothness of installation around a working cathedral was unexpectedly smooth. Ease of use is impressive.'
OmniLine had previously won in a further three AVIA awards for Sydney Railways Central Station Concourse, St Marys Cathedral North Sydney and Outdoor Urban Screen for The Concourse Chatsworth, again involving both TAG and the talents of Leembruggen and Gilfillan. TAG technical director, Anthony Russo, said 'It's hugely satisfying to see OmniLine's versatility, control and beautiful compact nature getting the recognition it so richly deserves.'