NAZARIO SAURO SUBMARINE – Italy
Built in the Fincantieri shipyards and launched in 1976, the Nazario Sauro submarine was retired in 2005 after covering a total distance of 111,875 miles with its 51-man crew. Renovated at the same shipyards, it is now enjoying a second lease of life at the heart of Costa Edutainment’s exhibition and on-shore pre-show at “Galata Museo del Mare” - a project with a total investment of €2.4 million. Before boarding the sub, visitors center the interactive pre-show in the harbour-side museum, designed by director Pierangelo Campodonico. This enables them to understand the hardships of a submariner’s life, try their skills at underwater and surface navigation and even earn a submariner certificate.
The company charged with bringing the submarine to life, installing a multimedia system in the restricted space at its disposal, was IBR Sistemi located in Genova, Claudio Donato explains the brief his firm received: “There were several fundamental aspects to be taken into consideration: audio, power and IT network cable runs had to be completely invisible, as did the loudspeaker enclosures (14 Audeo 106 BK two-way 50W enclosures and two Ambit SB 110 150W subwoofers). As well as being out of sight, these also had be positioned in such a way as to give visitors the impression of being surrounded by the crew of a fully operational sub. All this had to be planned from the drawingboard stage in such a way as to simplify and facilitate control and maintenance work to the utmost”. The installation’s main aim was to present the submarine as if it was perfectly operational, enabling visitors to feel part of an exciting, historically accurate experience. As well as running in the correct operating sequences, the sounds of engines, motors and apparatus also had to take into consideration visitors’ movements onboard. A custom electronic interface enables software distributed over three PCs to use the signals received from the proximity sensors distributed along the visit route to trigger synchronised audio and video feeds accordingly. A central PC in the sub’s control room enables all the system’s hardware to be switched on and off or supervised, displays any error messages and runs an auto-reset in the event of staff not taking the appropriate action. Donato adds: “Visitors returning to the sub will not find the experience repetitive, as a considerable number of operational simulations are available and visitors have access to only a small part of the multimedia content on each visit: the combinations of the various zones are run in a coherent but never identical manner. For example, the interactive intercoms have a library of messages and give visitors orders to which they have to reply according to their position”.
The Ecler equipment installed is:
- 1 x MPA 6-80 (Multichannel amplifier)
- 1 x MPA 4-150 (Multichannel amplifier)
- 1 x MPA 6-150 (Multichannel amplifier)
- 1 x AMI 2-70R (Preamplifier + stereo amplifier)
- 14 x AUDEO 106 BK (Surface mount loudspeaker)
- 2 x AMBIT SB110 (Surface mount loudspeaker)









