Richmond Sound Design at Dutch Maritime Museum

On October 2, the Dutch Maritime Museum -- Het Scheepvaartmuseum -- reopened following a major renovation. The museum consists of several themed exhibitions, object exhibitions and interactive exhibits. The Dutch multimedia company Rapenburg Plaza made an important contribution to the interior layout of the museum.

It is responsible for the complete media and lighting control, the major part of the audio-visual installations and also the entire technical content, including the lighting and sound design for the Voyage at Sea, a 20-minute show divided over five rooms in which the public is taken on a journey through five hundred years of Dutch maritime history. A Richmond Sound Design SoundMan-Server virtual sound system with 96 track playback and 48 input and output channels handles all the sound content and effects as well as all audio from the video sources in this amazing attraction.

To control all three themed exhibitions, the seven object exhibitions, and the two interactive exhibits, Rapenburg Plaza designed, installed and programmed a network based on ShowControl. This system was built using Medialon software, KissBox interfaces and industrial network hardware and software. The system allows the personnel complete control over all lighting and AV equipment, however Rapenburg Plaza programmers can also manage and monitor the entire installation remotely.

Rapenburg Plaza itself was partly responsible for the lighting control system. An open DMX infrastructure was fitted to low-voltage rails in all the museum's rooms and showcases, providing more than four thousand individually addressable spotlights with the correct data. All fittings were therefore included in a large E*Net DMX network and can be individually controlled. This not only applies to all LED fittings in the showcases but also to all tunable-white and RGB spotlights on the ceiling rails.