The German shipping company Köln-Düsseldorfer Deutsche Rheinschifffahrt GmbH has expanded its fleet and put the ship MS RheinGalaxie into service. The new event liner has been at home in Düsseldorf since April 2022 and will travel the river Rhine as the new hip event location, mainly near cities Düsseldorf and Cologne.
The ship is a floating event location that can be used in various ways. Whether for spectacular events, conferences, trade fairs, parties or gourmet cruises – the highly-modern ship impresses with its innovative design and high-quality technical equipment. To make the various events shine in terms of sound, audio systems from RCF are used in many places on the ship. After equipping the ships MS RheinEnergie and MS RheinFantasie with sound systems from RCF in 2019, the owner also decided on RCF for the audio technology for the MS RheinGalaxie. During planning and installation, the technicians had to consider the special structural conditions and the different types of events. For this purpose, the team led by RCF planner Georg Hofmann relied on systems from the TT+ and HDL series, among others, which are installed for the transmission of the stage sound but also in the lounge, working in an optimally coordinated manner.
The 85-metre-long and 14-metre-wide MS RheinGalaxie can welcome up to 1,000 guests on board. The prominent locations for parties and concerts are the stages located on the sun deck and main deck. As a unique feature, the stage on the main deck is arranged sideways, thus ensuring optimal proximity to the guests. The room height of the main deck stretches over three decks, including a gallery and thus enables completely new views and possibilities for events. The sun deck houses the ship’s second party location with an 85 sqm stage.
Benedikt Hock, sound engineer in charge at Köln-Düsseldorfer, is enthusiastic about his new event ship: “After we have already equipped two ships with audio technology from RCF and were convinced by the result, we are very pleased that the team from RCF Germany has also supported us at the MS RheinGalaxie. We are aware of the ship’s special features being an event location, and the cooperation with the RCF team was great fun, which of course, also bleeds into the final result. With RCF’s audio technology on the MS RheinGalaxie, we have the flexibility to respond to every customer request.”
The main stage is located on the main deck in the middle of the ship’s side, with the balcony above the stage open so spectators can also see the stage from the upper deck. They should also be able to enjoy perfect sound. So the challenge was to realise a nearly 180° sound reinforcement. Due to low ceiling heights, additional delay speakers were needed. The upper deck is equipped with 7x HDL 26-A and 4 units TT052-A as the primary system for the stage. As the central sound system on the main deck, two pairs of HDL 26-A are mounted on the ceiling. 12x TT 052-A units hang horizontally from the ceiling as delay speakers, complemented by 2x Sub 9006-A.
The area in front of and on the stage of the sun deck is supplied with sufficient audio power by 12 units TT 08-A MK2, 2x TTW 4-A and 4x Sub 8004-AS. The loudspeakers are partly attached to the truss construction, placed on the floor or integrated into the ship’s structure. Another 13x RCF Commercial Audio series MQ 60 H units are located in the Sky Lounge and Club Lounge.
Despite the difficult local conditions, with their different acoustic challenges, the RCF team could illuminate the individual locations acoustically, ideally with the other speaker types. All RCF units used are active 3- or 2-way loudspeakers and can be driven and controlled with RCF’s tool RDNet. With RDNet, users have access to many individual parameters of each loudspeaker and, of course, to the entire system. The individual components of the complete sound system per location and also distributed over the whole ship are optimally coordinated with each other and enable the owners to fully exploit the potential of their new floating event location.
Further information on the ships of Köln-Düsseldorfer can be found here: www.k-d.com/de
Info: www.rcf.it/en