Founded in 1946, Ikegami Tsushinki is a Japanese manufacturer of high-quality professional broadcast equipment, particularly known for its television cameras. Ikegami is best known for introducing the world's first portable handheld TV camera, which debuted in the United States in 1962 when CBS used it to record the launch of NASA's Aurora 7 manned space flight. in 2022, the company, which is actively working on next-generation broadcast standards and IP workflows, is celebrating its 75th anniversary - a milestone that is a complete renovation of its office building in Tokyo, including a sophisticated new seminar room equipped with Genelec's smart IP loudspeakers (opens in new tab).
Today, the world of broadcasting is in the midst of tremendous change with the advent of Internet broadcasting with IP transmission. Ikegami is actively evolving along these lines to match traditional terrestrial broadcast technologies, and the choice of Genelec's Smart IP loudspeakers for their new seminar room underscores their commitment to developing IP workflows.
In fact, the design is entirely from the attendees' point of view. The rectangular room is configured with six separate audio zones and is designed in such a way that the speaker can be heard clearly from anywhere in the room, with no interference between zones. Genelec's Smart IP loud speakers provided the best means of achieving this design, Hirai said.
The room has many physical pillars, so we installed a total of six 4430 speakers in an L/C/R configuration in the front half of the room and the same in the back half to deliver audio to each of the six zones," notes Hirai." The speakers are angled radially toward the center of each zone. The large display panel is also an important part of the experience, so the system is configured in such a way that, when appropriate, the sound appears to come from the display, which is placed close to the speakers for a realistic experience. We defined the center 4430 above the screen as the virtual sound source and used 3D modeling software to calculate the temporal alignment of each speaker's location. Surprisingly, once the time alignment was set, the sound output was so good that I didn't even need to calibrate the speakers - they sounded great right out of the box.
