Wood & Grieve tames wild acoustics at Qantas’ Sydney hub

AUSTRALIA: Taming the facility’s highly reflective and noisy environment, Trevan Johns & Associates in consultation with Wood & Grieve, has installed a selection of Bosch, Dynacord, and Electro-Voice audio products to provide zoned background music and intelligible sound throughout the Qantas hub at Sydney Airport.

The hub is Qantas’ primary airport hub, accommodating thousands of staff under its long, interconnecting roof. After being tasked with specifying the audio equipment for the facility, providing intelligible sound for the space was sure to be a challenge thanks to numerous acoustic issues identified by consulting engineers Wood & Grieve.

‘The Qantas hub is a very complex acoustic environment as it includes large amounts of reflective surfaces such as glass and terrazzo floor, and it is located underneath the secondary runway of Sydney Airport,’ explained Olivier Gaussen, national acoustics coordinator from Wood & Grieve Engineers.

To fully establish the acoustics of the space and design the sound system layout, an EASE model was created of the area. After reviewing the resulting model and equipment options, Bosch Communications was selected as the supplier. Trevan Johns & Associates were then awarded the winning sytems integrator contract, reportedly doing an exceptional job in the time available, and ensuring that the project was completed prior to the hub’s formal opening.

A total of 16 Bosch LS1 loudspeakers were installed along the building’s internal street, positioned directly above and visually complementing the streetlights. These were selected both because of their high speech intelligibility and SPL characteristics, but also because they project sound downwards helping to minimise unwanted reflections. The consultants also acoustically treated much of the space with various absorption materials in strategic locations.

Additional equipment consisted of an Electro-Voice NetMax N8000 DSP for background music routing, working in conjunction with a Dynacord Promatrix 8000 paging system to allow staff to page to any of the eight different acoustic zones within the hub and simultaneously provide BGM.

Furthermore, the consultants designed a large video screen to be fitted within the hub, opting to use Dynacord TS400 vertical arrays as accompanying speakers. The cabinets are positioned on either side of the screen with two additional E-V SB112 12-inch subwoofers positioned in the centre below the screen for extended low end. The cabinets were completely integrated into the design of the video wall frame, and as a result, are virtually invisible to the public. The airline also has an outdoor barbeque space designed for staff and patrons. Six Electro-Voice ZX1i weatherised loudspeakers were installed here to extend the BGM and paging capabilities.

Following the installation, Bryan Davidson from Bosch was asked to commission the system and perform some tuning. ‘It was quite a pleasing experience thanks to Woods & Grieve who had all their homework done in making sure that the space had a very low reverberation time, thereby allowing us to achieve a high STI,’ he explained.

‘After the commissioning was completed by the acoustical consultants, the dynamics, clarity and intelligibility from the sound system was astounding,’ added Trevan Johns, owner of Trevan Johns & Associates.

‘Qantas Airways stakeholders and executives were all very impressed by the quality and uniformity of the sound across the hub,’ concluded Mr Gaussen. ‘The design was a real success as reverberation time and speech intelligibility performance requirements were met in a very complex acoustic environment.’

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