Six researchers from the virtual acoustics team did a measurement tour in central Europe in November 13-22 2012. During nine days we traveled more than 3000km by bus and installed the loudspeaker orchestra on the stages of ten concert halls. One measurement took from 6 to 8 hours, so there was no problems of spending extra free time during the tour.

The tour started already one week before measurements in the lab by installing the loudspeaker orchestra to one lecture room to double check all equipment. In total, 537kg of loudspeakers, cables, stands, etc. were packed to flight cases and sent to Amsterdam. One week later, on Nov. 13, our crew flew to Amsterdam and started working in Concertgebouw. It was an easy start for the measurements as they were done in the evening. After good sleep in the hotel the real work started when our tour nightliner picked us up for the road. Next days were work at nights and sleep during days on the road to Cologne - Wuppertal - Bruxelles - Stuttgart - Vienna - Berlin - Munich.

When doing measurements all kind of problems occurs. When it was some humming in the wires or and induction loop that induced some error to our wires. The best one was in Munich where we traced a possible synchronization problem that caused strange pulses or discontinuities to signals every 1.2 seconds. Finally, after one hour of booting and resetting our system we learned that it was an ultra sound chirp from outside the windows of the hall. The chirps were there to drive away the pigeons that use to collect on the small balcony outside the hall. Somehow chirps were demodulated and our sensitive microphones captured the sound.

All in all, the tour was a real success and now we have 35 GB of recorded sweeps on the hard disk.