Müpa, Budapest (Hungary)

The Müpa museum, auditorium and conference center in Budapest has updated its sound system in the common areas. Müpa already had Fohhn Linea Focus Beam Steering speakers in the impressive main auditorium for more than 10 years. The good experience with the auditorium system led the Müpa team to choose again Fohhn speakers for the update of the common areas. The challenge was to achieve perfect intelligibility in the reverberant space, as well as have the enormous and complex space (more than 200 m length) completely time-aligned and reflection free. Several Linea Focus DLI-230 Beam Steering speakers are used along with Airea LX-20 ASX and LX-60 ASX. The results improved substantially the intelligibility compared to the old system, as well as the multiple custom color speakers allowed an excellent visual integration. All systems are integrated in a redundant network with Dante audio and Fohhn-net control that manages all building areas.

The goal of the project was to design a new PA system in the foyer of the Palace of Arts Budapest, as the existing system had to be replaced. Renowned Budapest-based Entel Ltd. was awarded the role of the acoustic consultant in the project. It was clear from the very beginning that the size, the geometric complexity, and the room acoustic conditions made this project quite challenging, not to mention the high expectations of the customer. Detailed room acoustic measurements around the multi-story foyer were performed, and a calibrated acoustic model was developed. After this, the types and the preferred positions of the speakers achieving optimum speech intelligibility performance were selected through multiple steps and iterations. After defining the virtual speaker positions and settings, the actual installation was carried out by the system integrator Broadmax Ltd. During the installation process, Fohhn provided personal assistance at the project site. Fernando Vidal-Wagner (Fohhn) helped Broadmax and Entel with setting up all the predefined parameters (gain, delay, and equalization) of each speaker and helped to finetune the system in the positions where it was necessary. The real-time adjustment of the Beam Steering Technology enhanced the speech intelligibility even further.

The project was a great success: the cooperation and communication between the manufacturer (Fohhn), the system integrator (Broadmax), and the acoustic consultant (Entel) were efficient and unobstructed, and the result became a pleasing, fully optimized solution according to the acoustic predictions, delivering customer satisfaction. - Consultant Csaba Huszty, Tamás Illy (Entel Kft.)
As system designer and integrator, we had to design and build a reliable, long life and high-end system. It was a true challenge to find the right speaker positions (along with Entel Ltd.) for high speech intelligibility but also keep all the speakers and cables as invisible as possible! The fine tuning of the system was very handy with the Fohhn remote control software. – Kristóf Fábián (Broadmax Ltd.) We had a continue fight for a long time with the previous system with that own capabilites and problems. It is a great pleasure that we could find a solution for an impressive sound system of an acoustically extremly problematic foyer. The management of MUPA is very satisfied with the result. With this excellent Fohhn system we could tune the delays and volumes with high accuracy between the two systems. - Müpa Budapest

We congratulate Broadmax and Entel Kft. for this successful installation.