Guess No More

​

​

Located right on the crossroad between Waterloo Road and Lancashire Road, with close proximity to the population (residentials), the Alliance Primary School is surrounded by one of the busiest thoroughfares in Hong Kong.  Housing several high quality school orchestras, choirs and musical ensembles, they never had a dedicated space for rehearsals.  Teachers and students had to utilise spaces such as the sportsground for that purpose until 2019, On Technology renovated the Assembly Hall (1/F) and Gymnasium (7/F).

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​
 

 

 

Assembly Hall (1/F)

 

Over the decades the Assembly Hall and the Gymnasium serve as venues for assembly, indoor-sports, rehearsals and performances.  Acoustics however was never considered in the original design.  Noise bleeding into the room and out to the neighbourhood had always been a serious issue for them.

 

On Technology provided Acoustic and Systems Design–Build (AV, PA, LED walls) for the project.  The Assembly Hall is a multi-purpose hall, primarily as a rehearsal venue for the orchestras and choirs.  For this reason, our goal was to provide them a very quiet room with noise isolation rating of STC 55, with a clean natural reverberation for comfortable listening with high speech intelligibility, and an even sound field to ensure every spot sounds just as good.  Combining all these parameters, we were able to achieve a very quiet yet crystal-clear sounding room for critical listening comfortably, accommodating the very large dynamic range of over 100dB produced by a full-size orchestra.

 

The sky's the limit to the young musicians from now on.

 

Best of all, without compromising the hall’s original functionalities, walls are finished in hard surfaces that can withstand impacts.  This allows the Assembly Hall to remain as a venue for indoor-sports with improved acoustics and lightings.  Truly a multi-purpose hall.

 

Gymnasium (7/F)

 

Similarly, we strike for the same goals in the Gymnasium except we look for even shorter reverberations.  This is because the room mainly serves for percussion rehearsals, which involves huge dynamics and subtle timeral details, requiring a very clean and comfortable rehearsal room.  Cleanliness and comfortability is of utmost importance in our design, as they’re decisive to students being able to play and tell about their own performances, without guessing.  These give students the confidence to perform, while preserving their precious hearings as they are no longer required to go excessive to hear themselves. 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audio System

 

Thanks to the already well-treated acoustics, the halls are now very clean sounding and have fairly even frequency responses with short reverbs.  This makes designing and installing the audio and sound reinforcement system much easier and faster.  The Assembly Hall and Gymnasium now both require only a pair of vertical array speakers and subwoofers.  The systems support multiple microphones at high gain across the venues without feedback.  Simple but not less, the system can produce concert level sound of at least 110dB evenly across the venue, without much leaking out.

 

No more multiple speakers, no more complicated setups, no more feedback.

 

Video System

 

Aside from the Assembly Hall and Gymnasium, two more venues, namely the Church and the Mini-Hall were also part of the equations.  The School is a very busy place and there are always events happening in the venues.  To accommodate the scenarios where “one-place-cannot-fit-all”, we designed a system that would link up all four venues and allow footages to be shared among them, real time.   

 

That means, what is happening in the Assembly Hall and Gymnasium, can be seen by visitors in the Mini-Hall and Church, and be recorded and broadcasted onto the web at the same time.

 

To compliment the video systems, LED walls were installed in the venues, to provide a future-proof solution that gives unobstructed view at better quality.