Monster Museum Mainly Meyer
Meyer Sound creates celestial aural environments in the new Shanghai Astronomy Museum across 2 planetarium theatres
20 December 2021
The new Shanghai Astronomy Museum, now the world’s largest museum devoted to the celestial sciences, echoes the ‘music of the spheres’ with its bold curvilinear exterior devoid of any straight lines or right angles. On the inside, the museum’s two primary venues feature Meyer Sound immersive audio systems supplied by Shanghai Broad Future Electro Technology Company, Ltd.
Designed by Ennead Architects of New York, the 39,000 square meter museum encloses three main exhibition zones — Home, Cosmos, and Odyssey — with the architecture encompassing three dominant architectural features: Oculus, Inverted Dome, and Sphere.
Occupying the interior of the Sphere is the 8K Dome Theater, which hosts an audience of 250 for a 20-minute spectacle covering 4.6 billion years of cosmic evolution. Designed using Meyer Sound’s MAPP 3D system design and prediction tool, the theatre’s immersive audio system comprises of 32 Meyer Sound UPJ-1P loudspeakers that surround the 20-meter dome in three tiers. A cluster of four 900-LFC subwoofers delivers visceral low frequency emphasis, while three-dimensional spatial sound trajectories are created using the Spacemap feature in CueStation. Up to 64 tracks of audio program source are available from the DWTRX recording/playback module of the D-Mitri digital audio platform.
The Optical Planetarium, inside the Home Zone, combines stunningly realistic recreations of constellations and planetary movements with a film about nature and the universe. Here the audio system encircles the audience with 36 UPJunior loudspeakers on four levels, again augmented by four 900-LFC subwoofers for low frequency effects. Loudspeaker optimisation is provided by one GALAXY 408 and two GALAXY 816 Network Platforms.
Opened earlier this year in Lingang New City in the Pudong New Area district, the Shanghai Astronomy Museum is the latest addition to the larger Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. The museum has been awarded a three-star rating in China’s Green Building System, the highest level attainable.
Meyer Sound: meyersound.com
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