Flagship audio

Published: June 14, 2014 MEA

At more than 2,700 sq-m of retail space and at least the same in its back office, Istanbul’s new flagship Vakko store is a sizable establishment. For many retail sites of this size, the background music system is one of the items low down on the priority list. However, for the Vakko store it was right up at the top.
‘The owner of the company, Cem Hakko, is extremely picky when it comes to sound quality, which I like,’ says Tevfik Bingel technical manager at Can ProAV, the company responsible for designing and installing the retail store’s sound system. ‘He is the founder of the first national private radio stations and currently owns a number of TV and radio stations as well as production companies,’ he explains. ‘I yearn for these kinds of customers, because otherwise it’s hard to justify the pricepoint, the detail of the project and the reason you are specifying particular products and technologies.’

Vakko required ‘hi-fi’ sound quality, sound pressure uniformity and the full frequency spectrum delivered throughout the 27-room flagship site. When Can ProAV became involved, the store already had a number of tenders for the system, but the Istanbul-based integrator offered something different. ‘When I examined the other tenders regardless of the price, they were all based on Hi-Z 100V systems. I told them straight away that even though this is a big venue, with Hi-Z systems you’re limited in the extreme edges of the frequency spectrum,’ recalls Mr Bingel. ‘The cost might be lower than traditional Low-Z systems but I doubted that they would be satisfied with the sound quality.’

To counter this, Mr Bingel designed a Low-Z solution using a range of high-quality loudspeakers while products from Rane and Powersoft formed the core. ‘The backbone is Rane, I hadn’t used HAL before, but it turned out to be an excellent product, I loved it. I have used many similar systems but this was beyond anything else,’ he states. ‘The sound is very good, very natural, the interface is very intuitive - anybody with reasonable experience could use it. The latency is extremely low, and the after-sales support through the local distributor Radikal and the company itself was extremely helpful.’

A Rane HAL1x multiprocessor and a HAL EXP3x expander form the brains of the system while RAD3 and RAD17 modules have also been installed. Completing the Rane setup are four DR3 remotes which are used for controlling the zone behaviour as well as the source and volume. ‘I had to do a lot of things with the DSP, but it handled them well,’ says Mr Bingel. ‘It guides you through the process for each and every step when you are constructing the DSP structure. It’s very intuitive in that regard. Learning how it works and finalising the sound took me less than half a day.’

According to the technical manager, the Rane DSP proved its worth during the commissioning of the store. ‘It’s a two storey space, initially they wanted each floor as a zone and they have a store-in-store – Vera Wang – which they wanted a different stream for,’ he recalls. ‘During the commissioning, they asked for it to be done in a different way, so we rearranged the zoning to include the 10 or 11 wedding rooms as a single zone, the rest of the space as the second zone and Vera Wang as the final. It took me less than 10 minutes to do this.’

Away from the DSP, another important aspect was the amplifiers. For this Can ProAV turned to Powersoft M28Q amps. ‘The amplification was chosen for long cable runs,’ says Mr Bingel. ‘When you combine long cable runs and 147 speakers, even though you balance out the impedance in the conventional way, you need a really good amplifier, it’s not a job for wimpy amplifiers,’ he explains. ‘There are 16 four-channel amplifiers, it’s all in stereo and there are different kinds of loudspeakers with different crossovers and EQ settings, different filtering and compressions. Also I’ve used filtering in all the inputs and all the outputs.’

While many of the systems were sourced from one manufacturer – even the 10km of cabling was all from Sweden’s Supra Cables – the loudspeakers were one area where a variety of products were called on. ‘In the speaker selection we had many different styles of rooms and used different speakers for each,’ says Mr Bingel. ‘For open ceiling and pocketed ceiling rooms, we used Cornered Audio C4 speakers and C12PNC subs. They are all high in the ceiling in secluded corners so you don’t get to see the speakers.

‘In the rooms with no pockets or without the space to use those speakers, we went for in-ceiling speakers. For lower ceilings in smaller rooms, we went for Polk Audio speakers,’ continues the technical manager. ‘It’s a consumer brand, but they liked the sound of them.’ This formed the main bulk of the speaker inventory with 97 VS90RT installed. ‘The third kind of speakers were for the atriums, they also requested something invisible and the ceiling height varied from 8.45m to 12m. I went for ten JBL Control 47 high ceiling speakers,’ he recalls. ‘To me as a highly picky audio engineer, I’m satisfied with the sound,’ notes Mr Bingel. ‘I would have liked to use subwoofers in some spaces, but the architectural design didn’t allow for it.’

The end result is something that made Vakko reconsider the way it plays out its in-store BGM. ‘They have lots of stores inside Turkey and around the world, but I think this is the highest quality sound system they ever had,’ says Mr Bingel. ‘After they heard MP3s through the system, they understood that they needed to play high resolution wav files instead. So the sound quality is really high now.’