News

Tech-y Tunnelling Trip; Destination: New Zealand

Earlier this month we were excited to head across the ditch to NZ to complete the final stage of the electro-acoustic commissioning in both the Victoria Park Tunnel and Johnstone Hill Tunnels, Auckland.

These tunnels are key routes which enable smoother and safer traffic flow for hundreds of thousands of people travelling in to and out of Auckland each day. Given the risks of emergencies occurring in these tunnels they are fitted with sound systems that broadcast emergency announcements to people who are outside their vehicles. In response to the need to provide high degree of speech clarity for these emergency situations, the Auckland Motorway Alliance (AMA) has upgraded the emergency sound systems in these tunnels. Road tunnels are terribly hostile environments for amplified sound, and to provide high speech clarity is a challenge. The AMA engaged Acoustic Directions to provide advice and design to provide the best-possible system, which has now been installed by Bartons Sound Systems who are a premier audio integrator in NZ. Our task was to optimize and then benchmark the intelligibility and sound quality performance of the new system, which involved the combination of large number of acoustic measurements and a lot of critical listening.

Working with Auckland Motorways is always a pleasure as they are supportive and helpful in facilitating our site work to ensure an optimum result can be achieved in a relatively short time frame. Thank you for another great experience. The end result is that the speech is really clear and a natural, and we are pleased to have helped the Auckland Motorway Alliance with this important endeavour.  Bring on more late nights and long tunnels! Ah, the life of a mole…